Transcription linguistics: Encyclopedia II - Transcription linguistics - Specialised sense: transcription from one language to another

Transcription linguistics - Specialised sense: transcription from one language to another

In a more specialised sense, a transcription is (a system of) writing the sounds of a word in one language using the script of another language. Any reader of the latter language should be able to pronounce the transcribed word (almost) correctly. As the word may contain sounds that are unknown in the latter language, this goal is not always reached completely.

Transcription can be distinguished from transliteration, which creates a mapping from one script to another that is designed to match the original script as directly as possible. Transcription and transliteration are different only in a subtle way, and the two terms are sometimes used synonymously. In general, transcriptions are used to write for the general public, as in newspapers or a general-purpose encyclopedia. Transliterations tend to be used by linguistic researchers and learners of a language who have not yet mastered the language's writing system.

The same words are likely to be transcribed differently under different systems. For example, the Mandarin Chinese name for the capital of the People's Republic of China is Beijing in the commonly-used contemporary system Hanyu Pinyin, and in the historically significant Wade Giles system, it is written Pei-Ching.

Transcription can be done into a non-alphabetic language too. For example, in a Hong Kong Newspaper, George Bush's name is transliterated into two Chinese characters that sounds like "Bou-sū" (布殊) by using the characters that mean "cloth" and "special". Similarly, many words from English and other Western European languages are borrowed in Japanese and are transcribed using Katakana, one of the Japanese syllabaries.

See also transcription of Chinese, transcription of Russian.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Specialised sense: transcription from one language to another", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki