What’s the difference between translation and transliteration?
17th August 2020
Many people assume transliteration is equivalent to translation. However, there are some significant distinctions.
Translation, put in simple terms, gives you the meaning of a word that’s written in another language.
A transliteration doesn’t tell you the meaning of the word, but it gives you an idea of how the word is pronounced in a foreign language. It makes a language a little more accessible to people who are unfamiliar with that language’s alphabet.
Many languages, such as Russian and Bulgarian, use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Japanese uses Kanji and Hindi and Nepali use a Devanagari script. Transliteration converts these scripts into Latin letters but it doesn’t actually translate their meanings.
Latin letters are used in some of the most common languages spoken around the world, including English, German, French and Spanish.
If the words ‘Good Evening’ aren’t transliterated from Simplified Chinese to Latin letters, the Simplified Chinese (晚上好)is almost impossible for anyone but a Mandarin speaker to understand. Transliterated into Latin, this word becomes Wǎnshàng hǎo which is much easier for us to pronounce. Those of us who like exploring Chinese and Arabic speaking countries, should be grateful that transliteration exists!
Examples of transliteration
If you go to a Chinese restaurant in London, you often notice that their menu isn’t written in English, but you can roughly guess the meaning. For example, Wan Ton Soup or Chow Mein. If Chow Mein was written in Mandarin characters (炒面) you would have no idea what those characters meant unless you were a Mandarin speaker. Chinese restaurants help their customers by providing a transliteration of the Simplified Chinese script into Latin letters to help you understand their menu.
In another example, we look at a Hebrew word for the Festival of Lights holiday which is חנוכה.
The English transliteration of the Hebrew word is Hanukkah or Chanukah.
This chart shows you the complete Hebrew alphabet with transliterations.
