What is transliteration

Transliteration is defined as ‘a transcription from one alphabet to another’.

From an information-theoretical point of view, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word, or ideally letter by letter. Transliteration attempts to use a one-to-one correspondence and be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To achieve this objective, transliteration may define complex conventions for dealing with letters in a source script which do not correspond with letters in a goal script.

Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which specifically maps the sounds of one language to the best matching script of another language. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the goal script, for some specific pair of source and goal language. If the relations between letters and sounds are similar in both languages, a transliteration may be (almost) the same as a transcription. In practice, there are also some mixed transliteration/transcription systems that transliterate a part of the original script and transcribe the rest.

Also, transliteration should not be confused with translation, which involves a change in language while preserving meaning. Transliteration performs a mapping from one alphabet into another.

In a broader sense, the word transliteration is used to include both transliteration in the narrow sense and transcription. Anglicizing is a transcription method. Romanization encompasses several transliteration and transcription methods.

Cross Script Transliteration

For the beneftit of devotees, we have implemented a simple vernacular transliteration scheme where in, those who cannot read the Devanagari script (Sanskrit), can choose their own mother tongue (currently limited to Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam) or Latin (diacritics) and read the shlokas and other Sanskrit matter without much difficulty. This can be achieved by choosing the script of yor choice on the right column of the page.