What is the opposite of transliteration?

Question

Imagine that someone takes a word in another writing system (say, the Greek word 'αγαπη') and transliterates it into the Roman alphabet (in this case, 'agapē'). Then I take that romanization and try to convert it back into its original form in the original writing system. What am I doing? I'm not transliterating 'agapē' - I'm trying to recover the original, un-transliterated version.

Example:

I'm writing a program to _ transliterated Greek words so I can easily search a Greek dictionary for them.

I am in fact writing a program that does this to transliterated Greek and am looking for some good phrasing for how to describe it. Google searches have only yielded descriptions of the difference between 'transliteration' and 'transcription', neither of which is what is happening here...

Answer 1

According to the University of Arizona Library:

Definitions: Transliteration - The spelling of the words of one language with characters from the alphabet of another. Ideally, this is a character for character replacement so that reverse transliteration into the original script is possible.

Answer 2

You are transliterating it.

Just as with translating, if you translate something to another language, when you put it back into the first language you are also translating it - or possibly 'retranslating' or 'translating back'.

To make it more clear what you are doing I would go with 'retransliterating' or 'transliterating back'.

Answer 3

I'd describe it as "(trying to) recover the original Greek (from the Roman transliteration)" the first time I described it, and refer to it as "the recovered Greek" thereafter. Because, while what you are doing is an act of transliteration, the word is native to Greek, and transliteration is almost always done out of, and not into, the native alphabet. You will be continuously confusing people if you just call it transliteration.

Additionally, you may in the future decide to improve your program by looking for the closest matching Greek word from some list of valid words. It would still be accurate to describe this as "recovery", but not "transliteration".

Answer 4

In the generic case, it's still transliteration. It doesn't become something different just because the choice of writing systems changes (for example, it's still be transliteration to go from 東京 to طوكيو). You might, in some cases, hear 'back transliteration' (as an analogy to 'back translation', the process of translating something that was just translated back to the original language, usually to verify the quality of the translation or demonstrate issues with it) for the specific type you're doing, but that kind of implies some kind of verification of the original transliteration.

In your case, however, 'recovery of the original spelling' is what I'd go with for the description, because from what you're describing it sounds like you're dealing with words that haven't just been transliterated, but possibly been modified to allow for more 'natural' pronunciation in the target language (see for example 'waifu', which is an English transliteration of a Japanese loan of the English word 'wife', the spelling and pronunciation changed in Japanese because of the phonetic and spelling rules of the language).

Answer 5

How about detransliteration? It seems pretty logical.

Answer 6

Per the definition, transliterate means to print/write a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language. It would apply regardless of whether you were "recovering the original text or not.

Answer 7

I think the exact word depends on some details of your algorithm.

If you are simply applying the rules to go from Roman to Greek, you are of course transliterating. You could say transliterating back (to Greek) to add a little more info.

Whereas if you are reversing the original transformation, then something like detransliterating may be appropriate. The difference from simple transliteration is in cases where the transliteration is not one-to-one. Let me give you a (fake, invented) example going from Roman to Greek: say both 'd' and 'th' go to 'greek-delta', then transliteration would map 'greek-delta' to 'd', but detransliteration would find which of 'd' or 'th' is correct.

Answer 8

Perhaps you could use the phrase "original writing" of the word. Furthermore, you may introduce a new term such as "originalizing" to describe what you want to do.

Answer 9

THE OP wrote: Imagine that someone takes a word in another writing system (say, the Greek word 'αγαπη') and transliterates it into the Roman alphabet (in this case, 'agapē'). Then I take that romanization and try to convert it back into its original form in the original writing system. What am I doing? I'm not transliterating 'agapē' - I'm trying to recover the original, un-transliterated version.

There is no opposite of transliterate. Original substitution is what it is.

There is the original text and the transliterated text.

You would merely be substituting the original for the transliterated text. You are not recovering anything since you had to have the original to transliterate in the first place. You are replacing or substituting the original source text for the target text.

In translation, you have a source text (A) and a target text (B). The same would be true in transliteration.

You have an original text (A) in the source language and you create a transliterated target text (B).

Back translation is completely different. Back translation seeks to compare a target language text (a translated text) with the original text. The idea is that when a not-so-good translator did the translation, she might have made errors which the back translation is supposed to reveal or catch. The method (much used in medical and technical translation, unfortunately) is very faulty as the back translator has to be very good so as not to "mis-translate" to the original and to accept that the translation being checked may have translated the actual meaning of a poorly written original. Back translation is based on the false assumption that meaning is bi-directionally equal (like two columns that can replace each other). Text A and Text B are never "equivalent" because meaning functions differently in different languages. So Text B might be a good translation of Text A, but it is never "functionally equivalent" as in a math equation.

In short, in translation and back translation, you are dealing with meaning and trying to make sure meaning is preserved.

Transliteration has nothing to do with meaning per se and everything to do with the phonetics of a language.

Going from the transliterated text to the original is simple substitution.

(People really seem to be getting their knickers in a twist about this question but as a translator, I deal with translation and back translation all the time, and transliteration has nothing to do with translation. It is most obviously: substitution or replacement.)

Answer 10

I would use revert instead.

I'm writing a program to revert the Roman transliteration of Greek words so the Greek form can be used to search a Greek dictionary.