In a globalizing digital market, transliteration is an upcoming service. As a company you can realize growth by providing online content, products or applications in multiple languages through the Internet. These translation and localization projects focused in our region mainly on Western European languages. There’s no transliteration needed in those language pairs.
Organizations with specific geographical focus already translate to ‘exotic’ languages with different alphabets. However, I predict this will become more mainstream, also for companies without ties in these language regions. And why not go into these markets? Imagine, in China there are 568 million Internet users and in comparison – 254 million in the US. Website translations to, for example, Chinese, Korean, Russian or Arabic will be more common. The difference in alphabet, writing direction and larger cultural differences cause for more factors in translation work, such as transliteration. But what is transliteration? Here’s a common definition: “To write words or letters in the characters of another alphabet.” (Merriam-Webster)
Our translators know the systems and methods that are created for transliteration, such as hanyu pinyin for Chinese. Also for Russian – using the Cyrillic alphabet – there’s a common system in place for Romanization, or the conversion to our Latin writing. The other way around can be trickier sometimes, especially with names. Your company name for example, or products, services, or even the names of certain people involved. These names do not exist in the writing of the target language and so you can choose to keep it in Latin writing or, if you really want to localize well, you can transliterate these names to the local characters by our experienced translators.
Transliteration of (domain)names
For Gamebasics we have transliterated many soccer player names to Chinese, Japanese and Korean. The pronunciation plays an important role here. These names, which could also be your company or product name, need to be reconstructed from scratch by our translator. A name such as Georginio Wijnaldum (player of PSV Eindhoven) may cause quite some trouble for a Chinese translator. In such cases, the transliterator will have to hear the pronunciation of the name in Dutch first, before he or she can do the transliteration. Sometimes the audio feature of Wikipedia comes in handy. By the way – as far as Chinese goes – we can do simplified, traditional Mandarin as well as Cantonese and Taiwanese.
Since recently, domain names can also be localized as a whole. Even the extensions are partially available in non-Latin writing, click here for more information. The overall web experience needs to be local for a translated website to be successful and transliteration plays a big role here.