Glossary
Transliteration
Transliteration represents the text of one language in the writing system of another, for example by writing a word in Latin letters. It keeps the spelling or sound and does not translate the meaning, which is what separates it from translation.
Updated October 17, 20261 cited fact, each traced to its source
Also called romanization.
Transliteration is writing a word or text in a different script or writing system, so that it can be read by sound or letter without being translated. Wikipedia defines it as the process of representing or intending to represent a word, phrase or text in a different script or writing system 1. Romanization is the common name when the target script is the Latin alphabet.
Transliteration keeps the sound and drops the meaning
A translation tells you what a word means in another language. A transliteration tells you how it is spelled in another alphabet. The Wikipedia article gives a Russian phrase that can be transliterated in more than one way, with each version keeping the original sounds in Latin letters while the meaning stays the same. Transliteration is therefore a spelling decision, and two careful writers may choose different systems.
Several systems can write the same word
Because there is no single rule, the same word can have several accepted spellings. Different scripts have their own established systems, and some are close to one-to-one while others are looser. When you dictate or type a name in a romanized form, the spelling you see depends on the system the software uses, not on what the word means.
Why it matters for dictation and typing
Voice typing software can produce text in the native script or in romanized form, and people search for, share and read these versions differently. A romanized Hindi message is easy to type on a Latin keyboard, but it can differ from the spelling a search engine expects. Before you dictate in a non-Latin language, check whether the output is in the native script or in Latin letters, and check the language setting, because the two are often tied together. The Hindi voice typing guide and the Arabic speech to text guide describe what each tool produces.
How transliteration relates to input methods
Many input methods are transliteration systems in practice. You type letters that sound like the word, and the input method offers the native-script characters. This is why the same input method editor (IME) can be used for typing a language in one style and for a different script in another. The choice of input method sets the spelling you get.
Related terms
- Input method editor (IME): the software that converts typed or spoken input into characters.
- Code-switching: speech that mixes two languages and writing systems.
- Homophone: words that sound alike but are spelled differently, which makes transliteration choices visible.
Guides that cover it
Evidence
Every number on this page, with where it comes from. Open a fact to see the exact words in its source.
- 1.
Related terms
- Dictation Languages, Accents and Voice TranslationThe topic this term belongs to
- AccentAn accent is the way a speaker pronounces a language, shaped by where they grew up, their first language or their community. Accents change pronunciation, not vocabulary, and speech recognition error rates can differ sharply from one accent to another.
- Character error rate (CER)Character error rate (CER) is the number of character insertions, substitutions and deletions needed to turn a recognizer's output into the correct text, divided by the number of characters in the correct text. It is the usual measure where words are not separated by spaces.
- Code-switchingCode-switching is the habit of moving between two or more languages within a conversation or a single sentence. Speech recognizers built around one language often misread the switched words, so mixed speech is harder to dictate than speech in one language.
- DiacriticsDiacritics are marks added to a letter, such as the acute accent in é, the tilde in ñ or the vowel marks in Arabic, that change how a letter sounds or which word it spells. Speech tools and everyday writers often leave them out, so a dictated word can come out spelled differently from what you meant.
- DialectA dialect is a regional or social variety of a language, with its own vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. Speech recognition is usually less accurate on dialects than on the standard form, because labeled training data for dialects is often scarcer.
- Input method editor (IME)An input method editor (IME) is software that supports text input for characters that cannot be typed easily on a standard keyboard, such as many East Asian characters. Speech input can also be an input method, and Android allows only one input method to be enabled at a time.
- LocaleA locale is a language combined with a region, and sometimes a script, such as en-GB for English as used in the United Kingdom. Dictation and speech settings use locales because the same language can differ in spelling, punctuation and speech patterns from one region to another.
- Low-resource languageA low-resource language is one with little digital speech and text data for training speech recognition and other language tools. There is no fixed cutoff, and a language can be well resourced for one task and poorly resourced for another.
- Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), also called Fusha, is the standardized form of Arabic used in writing and formal speech, such as news broadcasts and official documents. Speakers use regional dialects in everyday conversation, and speech tools recognize formal Arabic more accurately than dialect speech.
- Non-native speechNon-native speech is speech in a language that is not the speaker's first language, often called L2 speech or foreign-accented speech. Recognizers can transcribe read non-native English well, but they handle hesitations, repetitions and revisions differently, and results depend on the system.
- PinyinPinyin, also called Hanyu Pinyin, is the system that spells Mandarin Chinese syllables with the Latin alphabet and marks the tones with diacritics. People type Chinese by spelling the sound in Pinyin and choosing the character they want, and speech tools must choose among characters that share one Pinyin spelling.
- Right-to-left (RTL) scriptA right-to-left (RTL) script is a writing system, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu, whose letters run from right to left. Text that mixes these letters with digits or Latin words is bidirectional, so software needs a specific algorithm to order and display it.