# Lost in Translation

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-20 — 1 clipping.*

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> 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.
> ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
> 
> 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.
> 
> METADATA
> 
> Views11167 views since posted 2002-6-15; last edit 2024-07-30 13:08 UTC;
> 
> previous at archive.org.../whitaker_lost_in_translation;
> URLs changed in 2010, see archive.org.../bahai-library.org
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> — *Lost in Translation (Used by permission of the curator)*