By Carlos de Paula
Most translation done in the United States involves European
languages whose alphabets closely resembles ours, the Latin alphabet, with a
few differences here and there, mostly letters with accents. However, everybody knows that many languages
globally are written in different alphabets. Some, like Greek and Russian,
share a few characters and look a bit like ours, while others, like Chinese and
Hindi, are written in script that does not at all resemble our English
alphabet.
Translating most texts between languages with different
alphabets is a linguistic issue, however, translating names of persons,
locations and places can be a peculiar challenge.
That is because a lot of transliteration has changed in the
last few decades. Case in point, Mao Tse Tung became Mao Zedong, Bombay became
Mumbai, Alma Ata, Almaty, etc. There has been little change in Japanese
transliteration: Nakamura is still Nakamura, Nagoya, Nagoya, so on, so forth. That
is because Japanese is a syllabic language.
Transliterating a simple person’s name in alphabets that
resemble ours can be a nightmare. For instance, when I was writing a book on
car racing in the 70s, the last name of a Greek driver appeared spelled in four
different ways in non-Greek literature, so it was up to me to choose a
transliteration.
In immigration cases this can have devastating outcomes. Whenever
I receive a document written in a different alphabet I ask the client to
provide the spelling appearing in US visas, passports and the like. Believe it
or not, a simple “iy”, “ye” or “ii” ending can cause all types of trouble for a
client.
For more information http://birthcertificatetranslated.com
