Intelligence Community Standard is based on the BGN Romanization system Congressional authority to determine Romanization systems for rendering geographic names for all U.S. Government publications since 1947. The US Board on Geographic Names (BGN) . The DIA developed the Arab Linguist Iraqi Freedom (ALIF) Handbook for DOCEX**, which has adopted the BGN system,
… “It is sometimes difficult to maintain the BGN-transliteration spellings of personal, company or place names in view of the natural tendency to follow the spelling seen in mass media such as in The Washington Post, the New York Times, or as they are written in a translator's country of origin. The spellings in these influential publications are seen so often that they seem “right.” Adopting such spellings, however, creates havoc in intelligence databases for the simple reason that they do not follow any single, discernibly consistent system. Spellings must be based on a firm standard; that standard is the BGN Romanization system.”
On November 14, 2002 in the INTELLIGENCE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2003, mandated Transliteration for the entire Intelligence Community.
SEC. 352. STANDARDIZED TRANSLITERATION OF NAMES INTO THE ROMAN ALPHABET
(a) Method of Transliteration Required.--Not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Director of Central Intelligence shall provide for a standardized method for transliterating into the Roman alphabet personal and place names originally rendered in any language that uses an alphabet other than the Roman alphabet.
(b) Use by Intelligence Community.--The Director shall ensure the use of the method established under subsection (a) in--
(1) all communications among the elements of the intelligence community; and
(2) all intelligence products of the intelligence community.
Transliteration, in a narrow sense, is a mapping from one script into another script. It tries to be lossless, i.e., the informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To achieve this, it may define complex conventions about how to transliterate letters that have no simple correspondence in the goal script. Romaji, as an example, is a transliterating method.[1]
This is opposed to
transcription, which maps the
sounds of one
language to the script of another language. Still, most transliterations
map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the
goal script, for some specific pair of source and goal language. In Arabic
there are no Vowels "E" and "O" and no difference between long and short
vowels.
Another usage of the word transliteration is to describe the use of an English computer keyboard to type in a language that uses a different alphabet, such as in Russian. While the first usage of the word implies seeking the best way to render foreign words into a particular language, the typing transliteration is a purely pragmatic process of inputting text in a particular language. Transliteration from English letters is particularly important for users who are only familiar with the English keyboard layout, and hence could not type quickly in a different alphabet even if their software would actually support a keyboard layout for another language. Some programs, such as the Russian language word processor Hieroglyph provide typing by transliteration as an important feature. The rest of the article concerns itself with the first meaning of the word, that is rendering foreign words into a different alphabet.
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.
Greeklish is an example of such a mixture.
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. All standard translations pass through a two-tier level of translation - initial translation, proofreading and editing - to ensure cultural accuracy.[2]
For translating Arabic to English, it's a huge challenge. Arabic's a very old language. It doesn't have vowels. It has no punctuation. There are no capital letters. The machine translation engine has to tell from the context what a word means. For example, Taliban in Arabic is literally "two students," and this was the way it was translated on our machine translation service initially.[3]
While the search in English text is simple and there are many tools available for this, the search in Arabic text is very difficult. There are many forms for Arabic words, with suffixes, prefixes and root words, and words change completely when used in different tenses and forms.[4]
** This is an Extract of the 242 page document
