[Corpora-List] Arabic transliteration

[Ron Artstein]

On Sat, 20 Oct 2007, Eric Atwell wrote:

>>> Why do you want to transliterate your Arabic text to the Latin alphabet?
>>
>> Generally when we submit a research paper (written in English/ French)
>> on Arabic NLP we are asked to present the latin-character
>> transliteration for the arabic sentences !
>
> For this, I suggest the Buckwalter transliteration is not the 
> best solution, as it maps some Araic letters to ASCII characters 
> whcih are not roman alphabet letters, making the transcription 
> simple to process but hard for humans to read.

I wholeheartedly agree with Eric: Buckwalter transliteration is 
usually not appropriate for a published paper because only a 
handful of people working in Arabic NLP can read it fluently. The 
appropriate transliteration or transcription depends on the 
expected audience -- Arabists/Orientalists would probably be more 
comfortable reading a ZDMG-style transcription, whereas general 
linguists would probably prefer one based on IPA. The following 
page has a table comparing the two:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIN-31635

-Ron.

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