Lost in Translation
Exported from Holy-Writings.com on 2026-06-21 - 1 clipping

Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Brian Whitaker, Lost in Translation, bahai-library.com.
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Lost in Translation

Brian Whitaker

published in Guardian (UK)

2002-06-10

Transcribing Arabic into the Roman alphabet is fraught with
difficulty. And in an age of electronic text, search engines and
databases, the problem is only going to get worse.

Searching the BBC's vast website for articles about Colonel Gadafy
recently, I found just three mentions of his name.

As far as the BBC is concerned, this may be three times too many,
since its approved spelling of the Libyan leader's name is "Gaddafi".

Here at the Guardian, on the other hand, our policy is to call him
Gadafy - something we have succeeded in doing 325 times on our
website.

For good measure, we have also managed to write Gaddafi 42 times,
Gadafi eight times, and Gaddafy and Qadhafi twice each.

If given a completely free choice in the matter, I would much prefer
to call him Colonel Qadhdhaafiy because that spelling, besides being
more faithful to the original Arabic, accurately reflects the
eccentricity of the man.

Arguments about the ideal spelling of Arabic names go back at least
to 1926, when TE Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") sent his
130,000-word manuscript of Revolt in the Desert to be typeset.

A sharp-eyed proofreader complained that it was "full of
inconsistencies in the spelling of proper names, a point which
reviewers often take up".

Among other things, the proofreader noted that "Jeddah" alternated
with "Jidda" throughout the book, while a man whose name began as
Sherif Abd el Mayin later became el Main, el Mayein, el Muein, el
Mayin and le Muyein.

Lawrence, who relished such vagaries, told his proofreader to get
lost. "Arabic names," he replied, "won't go into English exactly, for
their consonants are not the same as ours, and their vowels, like
ours, vary from district to district.

"There are some 'scientific systems' of transliteration, helpful to
people who know enough Arabic not to need helping, but a washout for
the world," he continued. "I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot
the systems are."

Up to a point, Lawrence was right. Inconsistent spelling can
certainly be consistent with the inconsistency of Arabic
pronunciation, and in the 1920s - apart from the occasional
tut-tutting book reviewer - nobody would have minded very much.

Today, though, life is more complicated. Even the humble telephone
directory is becoming a problem. In Lawrence's time there were few
Arabs living in the London and even fewer with telephones.

But try looking them up today. An Arab known as Hassan al-Mughrabi
might be listed in any one of five places: as "Al Mughrabi",
"Al-Mughrabi", "El Mughrabi", "El-Mughrabi" or just plain "Mughrabi".

Confusion over the spelling of Arab names that have been transcribed
into the Roman alphabet can also lead to more serious problems.
Efforts by the FBI to track down Osama (Usama) bin Laden's (Ladin's)
supporters have been hampered by this, and a recent libel case in
Britain was complicated by the way spellings of Arab names changed
from document to document.

The obvious solution is to have a standard, internationally agreed,
system for converting Arabic script to the Roman alphabet, but that
is easier said than done.

For a start, only eight Arabic consonants - B, F, K, L, M, N, R, and
Z - have an indisputably equivalent letter in the Roman alphabet.
Arabic also has two distinct consonants that sound like S, and the
same applies to D, H and T.

In addition, there are some glottal sounds in Arabic that have no
obvious Roman equivalent. This leaves plenty of scope for scholarly
debate, with the result that there are now many supposedly
international standards.

One of the earliest was that adopted by the International Convention
of Orientalist Scholars in 1936. Another was agreed in 1971 at a
conference of Arab experts in Beirut and accepted - at least in
theory - by the countries of the Arab League.

Besides these, there is ISO 233, DIN 31635 and even a British
standard, BS 4280, which people are actively discouraged from finding
out about or using. The copyright of BS 4280 is closely guarded by
the British Standards Institute which charges £28 ($39) for an
eight-page booklet explaining the system.

Slightly more successfully, the US Library of Congress and the
American Library Association have issued "Romanisation tables"
covering more than 150 languages and dialects (including Arabic) that
are written in non-Roman scripts.

The system, originally devised for cataloguing books, has found its
way into wider academic use, and detailed explanations of how it
works can be found on several websites.

Meanwhile UNGEGN (the United Nations group of experts on geographical
names) has spent the past 30 years trying to standardise the spelling
of place names on maps and similar products with varying degrees of
success.

There are several reasons why all these Romanisation systems have
failed to catch on. One is that they are too clever for general use,
requiring dots, lines and other marks on certain letters which are
impossible to achieve with a typewriter or ordinary word-processor -
quite apart from baffling the average reader.

Another factor is that in some Arab countries - especially in North
Africa - French is more widely spoken than English. In these, the
preference is to Romanise Arab names in ways that correspond more
closely to French pronunciation.

So, for example, the Arab surname often spelled as Shaheen becomes
Chahine in French-influenced countries.

There are also a lot of vaguely phonetic spellings - such as "Koran"
and "Mecca" - that bear little relation to the Arabic spelling but
entered popular usage many years ago and are now difficult to
eradicate.

An internet search with Google shows that "Mecca" is used almost six
times more often than "Makkah" (the more accurate spelling that
Muslims generally prefer). In a similar search "Quran" scores 44%,
"Koran" 37%, and "Qur'an" 19%.

Spellings of the most common Arab name found by Google were: Muhammad
41%, Mohammed 32%, Mohamed 25%, Mahomet 3%.

Strictly speaking, there's no reason why E or O should ever appear in
an Arab name, since Arabic has only three vowels - A, I and U.

Many erroneous spellings have become so entrenched and familiar to us
that more accurate versions leave us mystified on the rare occasions
that we encounter them.

Last week I spotted a report in one of Britain's least-read daily
newspapers (News Line, published by the Workers' Revolutionary Party)
which mentioned a Palestinian politician called Sa'ib Urayqat. After
puzzling over this for a moment, I realised it was talking about the
man usually known as Saeb Erekat.

The spelling adopted by the Workers' Revolutionary Party is certainly
more logical but, as the party ought to have discovered by now,
having logic on your side does not necessarily attract followers.

Underlying the confusion is a tussle between the spoken and written
word. Early travellers to the Middle East usually wrote down words as
they heard them (or thought they heard them) in ways that readers
back home would find easy to pronounce.

This phonetic approach, which is the one Lawrence favoured, naturally
takes account of any local quirks in pronunciation.

Some of the differences are significant - for example, J is
pronounced as G in Egypt, while Q is pronounced as G in the Gulf -
and the result is that a single Arabic word, spoken by a Moroccan, an
Egyptian and a Saudi could easily appear as three different words if
written phonetically in the Roman alphabet.

On the other hand, transcriptions based on the written form of Arab
words (which is standard throughout the region) are less likely to be
ambiguous in meaning, even if they miss out on local colour.

But the conflict between the written and spoken word is never likely
to be fully resolved, especially in North Africa, where pronunciation
differs greatly from classical written Arabic. President Bouteflika
of Algeria is one person whose name would become unrecognisable if
transcribed classically.

Most of the ideas about how to transcribe (or how not to transcribe)
Arabic words into the Roman alphabet were developed long before
computers became an everyday tool - and now there are those who say
the whole approach has been wrong.

So far, we have only been concerned with one-way transcription of
Arab words into the Roman alphabet. But in the future, with
multilingual databases and so forth, we shall need to use the two
alphabets interchangeably.

So, for example, electronic text in Arabic would have to be converted
automatically into the Roman alphabet and then back again into
flawless Arabic.

Research in this area has been led by the Xerox company, and there's
an interesting but technical discussion of the issues by Kenneth
Beesley which can be found on the internet (see links below) [note: when I mirrored this article from www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,730805,00.html, there were no links provided. -J.W., 2010].

At a more practical level, there's an ingenious system called the
Buckwalter Transliteration. This was devised by Tim Buckwalter, a
lexicographer, for sending Arabic-language emails from computers
where the keyboard and display system allow only the Roman alphabet
to be used.

These developments hold out some fascinating prospects for the
future. But I fear it will still be some time before the world agrees
on how to spell Gadafy.

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-- Lost in Translation (Used by permission of the curator)