Re: Transliteration

Andrea Vine wrote:
>Francois Yergeau wrote:
>>
>> À 09:48 16-10-98 CDT, Albert Lunde a écrit :
>> >(I'm a little bothered by terminology here too; if it was just
>> >language to language, it's translation, not transliteration).
>>
>> Nope, the source and target languages matter even in translitteration.
>>
>> Source: the same characters in different languages, pronounced differently,
>> will typically be translitterated differently. For example "hanzi", "kanji"
>> and "hanja" are transliterations of the same Chinese characters from
>> Chinese, Japanese and Korean resp.
>>
>> Target: the characters of the target script will be used differently
>> according to the target language.  For instance, a certain Japanese phrase
>> will be transliterated to French as "ô negaï chima" and to English as "o
>> negai shima".
>
>I concur with Francois' sentiment, however, that would be "onegai shimasu" or
>"onegai simasu" in English, depending on the transliteration method.

I'm rather roughly aware of the differences in kanji usage amoung Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean, and I've studied enough Japanese to have seen a lot
of variations in romanization systems.

I don't want to make too much of a particular example, but this tends to
support  my position that the general case is a transformation among some
sort of tuples including the dimensions of language, script, and
character-encoding (and maybe others, I'm not sure).

The phrase "onegai shimasu" is _still_ in the Japanese Language _not_ in
the English language, it has just been written in a roman script.

(I think a translation could be something like "I beg of you", but the best
rendering may depend on context.)

The usual usage of "transliteration" suggests to me a transformation of
scripts or _perhaps_ character encodings, but not of language.

The usual usage, of "translation" suggests a transformation of languages,
where a change of scripts may or may not occur, according to common usage.
There are surely some cases that may be viewed as a pure translation, with
no change of scripts.

But I think what you-all want to label is not one of these more specfic
cases, but a general transformation that can encompass them all.

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu

Received on Saturday, 17 October 1998 00:16:14 UTC