[Gnso-newgtld-wg-wt5] Notes & Action Items - New gTLD Subsequent Procedures PDP Work Track 5 - 10 July 2019

Jaap Akkerhuis jaap at NLnetLabs.nl
Wed Jul 10 21:33:58 UTC 2019


 Julie Hedlund writes:

  <snip>

  ... 3. Transliterations into ASCII and conversion to DNS labels...

During the call I made a comment in the chat room stating something
like "There is no such thing as transliteration into ASCII".  Let
me expand on that.

I understand (and I'm not an expert in languages) that to transliterate
is to write or print (a letter or word) using the closest corresponding
letters of a different alphabet or language: names from one language
are often transliterated into another. ASCII is not a language but
an encoding of a set of (alphabetic) glyphs so transliterating into
ASCII doesn't make a lot of sense. For the same source language one
can easily have different transliterated forms depending on the target
language. Transliterations from say Korean will be different if it
is meant for an Dutch speaking or Spanish speaking audience.

A trip to Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration>
tells me the following:

	Definitions[edit]

	Systematic transliteration is a mapping from one system of
	writing into another, typically grapheme to grapheme. Most
	transliteration systems are one-to-one, so a reader who
	knows the system can reconstruct the original spelling.

	Transliteration is opposed to transcription, which maps the
	sounds of one language into a writing system. Still, most
	systems of transliteration map the letters of the source
	script to letters pronounced similarly in the target script,
	for some specific pair of source and target language. If
	the relations between letters and sounds are similar in
	both languages, a transliteration may be very close to a
	transcription. In practice, there are some mixed
	transliteration/transcription systems that transliterate a
	part of the original script and transcribe the rest.

	For many script pairs, there is one or more standard
	transliteration systems.  However, unsystematic transliteration
	is common.


Note the last sentence "However, unsystematic transliteration is
common". That is my experience as well. In the three Parts of ISO
3166 are about ten different systems in use. (number is from my
faulty memory).

I personally would recommend not to touch transliterations as a
guiding principle with a ten foot pole. The possibility of confusion
and amount of discussion possible seems endless to.

I suggest that if the subject of transliteration pop up one it
better off talking about romanization <See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization>.

Regards,

	jaap


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