If you’re working with materials that include transliterations, you may discover that attempts to limit mayhem of spelling, formatting and grammar can thwart the most devoted of wordsmiths. If you’re transliterating from a language that does not use the Latin alphabet, such as Russian, Chinese or Hebrew, you may find that transliteration rules can’t be universally applied; one enthusiastically aims for consistency, but finds it is the hobgoblin of literary minds.
This quick article takes a square look at the challenges of developing a transliteration protocol in bilingual writing. It does not attempt to provide a comprehensive solution to this head-splitting topic. However, it does aim to provide a quick overview of key issues and considerations when making your own writing and formatting decisions:
Capitalization: Transliterated words need a consistent capitalization protocol. You can either keep all transliterations lower case, or capitalize the first letter of each word. Squash the urge to leave some transliterations in title case and others in lower case.
Character formatting: It may be helpful to italicize transliterated words. (I never advocate bold or all caps.) While it’s cleanest to keep the character format simple, those of us who dislike italics may opt to use them anyway once we discover a worse alternative: the terror of perpetual quotation marks.
Letter mapping: If you’re dealing with a language in which multiple letters make the same sound, you will need to decide how to transliterate each of the letters into English. For example, in Hebrew, you might decide to mark the letter khaf as kh and the letter het, which makes the same guttural sound, as h.
Translation frequency: Do you want your text to read like an English-only text? Use transliterations sparingly and stick primarily to the translation. Do you want readers to feel like they’re reading bilingually and getting a feel for the non-English words? Use transliterations more freely. Once you choose an approach, implement it consistently. For example, you may decide that a transliteration is translated the first time it appears in an article, but not in subsequent appearances of the word within that same article.
Translation formatting: Which comes first, the transliteration or the translation? You might determine that the English translation appears after the first instance of the transliteration, or vice versa. Determine whether the translation is written into the sentence (or in parentheses).
Popularized Spellings: Once you adopt a letter mapping approach and apply it consistently, you run into a problem: coping with accepted spellings. For example, if you’re transliterating names of cities, foods or popular concepts, common spellings exist and the question becomes whether to “insist” on the consistency of your house style or bow to common usage. In many cases, you simply cannot cross the spelling that is used, for example, in a city’s own literature.
Titles: Do you want transliterations in titles? If your transliterations come with a particular format, such as italics, quotation marks or parentheses, they may be too unwieldy. You may decide to use English-only in titles.
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