What is Transliteration?

Transliteration is the process of converting words or letters in one script to another script. With transliteration, one maps word to word or letter to letter.

In many cases, reverse transliteration is also possible. However, transliteration may not preserve the subtle differences in sounds that are specific to a language.

Transliteration is not Translation

Translation is converting text in one script into text in another script with equivalent sound. Transliteration is looking for equivalent alphabets and does not strive for equivalent meaning of the word or sentence.

How Transliteration Works in Loqate

Field based transliteration

Loqate has a compiled set of words for commonly used Address field values in each language. The compiled data for field based transform does transliteration in some cases and translation in some cases.

Character mapping

Loqate maps between both native and Latin character sets. The character mapping is used to do character based transliteration.

Native to Latin character set

If user enters an address in native language and needs the output in English, the individual address fields are queried in the address field set for the transliterated value. If not found, individual characters are transliterated. If either of these do not work, Loqate returns the original native word.

Below is a list of supported character sets within the Loqate Engine, along with the respective ISO-15924 codes. The default value is “Native” which means the output script will match the input wherever possible.

Latin [LATN]

The Loqate Engine has the ability to transliterate between native character sets and Latin across our core product functions: Verify, Register and Geocode. When an output script is set to Latin we will transliterate to English wherever possible.

Cyrillic (Russia) [CYRL]

Hellenic (Greece) [GREK]

Hebrew (Israel) [HEBR]

Kanji (Japan) [HANI]

Simplified Chinese (China) [HANS]

Arabic (United Arab Emirates) [ARAB]

Thai (Thailand) [THAI]

Hangul (South Korea) [HANG]

More Information

Transliteration is a core feature shared among all Loqate products and components. To find out more about how Loqate can help you, contact us today! For any technical help on transliteration, please visit our Support Forum (registration required).