Romanization

:In Antiquity, Romanization describes the spread of Roman culture and language.

Methods of romanization

Transliteration

If the romanization attempts to transliterate the original script, the guiding principle is a one-to-one mapping of characters in the source language into the target script, with less emphasis on how the result sounds when pronounced according to the reader's language. For example, the Nihon-shiki romanization of Japanese allows the informed reader to reconstruct the original Japanese kana syllables with 100% accuracy, but is not readable without prior study.

Related Topics:
Transliterate - Nihon-shiki - Japanese - Kana

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Transcription

Phonological

However, most romanizations are intended for the casual reader, who is unfamiliar with the intricacies of the original script and is more interested in pronouncing the source language. Such romanizations follow the principle of phonological transcription and attempt to render the significant sounds (phonemes) of the original as faithfully as possible in the target language. The popular Hepburn romanization of Japanese is an example of a transcriptive romanization designed for English speakers.

Related Topics:
Phonological - Transcription - Phonemes - Hepburn

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Phonetic

A phonetic conversion goes one step further and attempts to depict all phones in the source language, sacrificing legibility if necessary by using characters or conventions not found in the target script. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the most common system of phonetic transcription.

Related Topics:
Phonetic - Phone - International Phonetic Alphabet

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Tradeoffs

For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves tradeoffs between the two extremes. Pure transcriptions are generally not possible, as the source language usually contains sounds and distinctions not found in the target language, but which must be shown to for the romanized form to be comprehensible.

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In general, outside a limited audience of scholars, romanizations tend to lean more towards transcription. As an example, consider the Japanese martial art 柔術: the Nihon-shiki romanization zyūzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most people would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu.

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