Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription is the conversion into written, typewritten or printed form, of a written source - such as the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica articles of which are transcribed into the Wikipedia - or spoken language source, such as the proceedings of a court hearing.

In the latter case, transcription is the process of matching the sounds of human speech to written symbols using a set of standard rules, so that these sounds can be reproduced later. Usually these rules are organized on a phonetic basis and are specifically constructed in order to be maximally simple. Standard transcription schemes include the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and its ASCII equivalent, SAMPA. One can see numerous examples of transcription on the Common phrases in different languages page (in this particular case, using the standard English spelling rules). See also phonetic transcription

Specialised sense: Transcription from one language to another

In a more specialised sense, a transcription is (a system of) writing the sounds of a word in one language using the script of another language. Any reader of the latter language should be able to pronounce the transcribed word (almost) correctly. As the word may contain sounds that are unknown in the latter language, this goal is not always reached completely.

Transcriptions are used to write for the general public. For example, a newspaper; a general-purpose encyclopedia.

Transcription should be distinguished from transliteration in a narrow sense, q. v. However, transcription is sometimes also called transliteration.

The same words are likely to be transcribed differently under different systems. For example, for two transcription systems for Mandarin Chinese using the Roman alphabet, the PRC capital is: Pei-Ching in Wade Giles and Beijing in Hanyu Pinyin. See also transcription of Chinese, transcription of Russian.

Example:

Russian text	Борис Николаевич Ельцин
Typical transliteration	Boris Nikolaevič El'cin
English transcription	Boris Nikolayevitch Yeltsin
French transcription	Boris Nikolaïevitch Ieltsine
German transcription	Boris Nikolajewitsch Jelzin
Italian transcription	Boris Nikolaevic Eltsin
Dutch transcription	Boris Nikolajewitsj Jeltsin
Spanish transcription	Borís Nikoláievich Yeltsin

Transcription can be done into a non-alphabetic language too. For example, in a Beijing Newspaper, president Bush's name is transliterated into two Chinese characters that sounds like "Bùshū" (布殊) by using the characters that mean "cloth" and "weird".

After transcribing

After transcribing a word from one language to the script of another language:

• one or both languages may develop further. The original correspondence between the sounds of the two languages may change, and so the pronunciation of the transcribed word develops in a different direction than the original pronunciation.
• the transcribed word may be adopted as a loan word in another language with the same script. This often leads to a different pronunciation and spelling than a direct transcription.

When this process continues over several languages, it may fail miserably in conveying the original pronunciation. One ancient example is the Sanskrit word dhyāna which transcribed into the Chinese word Ch'an through buddhist scriptures. Ch'an (禪 Zen buddhism) was transcribed from Japanese (ゼン zen) to Zen in English. dhyāna to Zen is quite a change.

Another complex problem is the subsequent change in "preferred" transcription. For instance, the word describing a philosophy or religion in China was popularized in English as Tao and given the termination -ism to produce an English word Taoism. That transcription reflects the Wade-Giles system. More recent Pinyin transliterations produce Dao and Daoism. (See also Daoism versus Taoism.)