When words travel across borders, they often face a choice: should they keep their meaning or preserve their sound? Translation handles meaning, but transliteration tackles the challenge of sound. From city names to global brands, transliteration shapes how we recognize the familiar in unfamiliar alphabets, sometimes smoothly and sometimes with comic twists.
This matters because alphabets are not interchangeable sound maps. Some languages have letters for sounds that others simply do not. Transliteration is a way of carrying words across alphabets so that names, places, and ideas remain recognizable, even if they look a little different on the page.
Transliteration vs. Translation
To reiterate: translation tells you what something means; transliteration tells you how it sounds.
Consider the Russian city ะะพัะบะฒะฐ. Translating it would give you โMoscow,โ the English name we know. But transliterating it more literally would give you โMoskva,โ which is closer to the way Russians actually say it. Neither version is wrong, but they highlight the distinction: translation adapts meaning, while transliteration adapts sound.
A similar example is the name of Chinaโs capital city. For much of the twentieth century, English speakers knew it as Peking. This was a transliteration of its name using the older Wade-Giles system developed in the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the Chinese government promoted โpinyin,โ a system that more closely matches Mandarin pronunciation. Under this system, the city became Beijing. Today both forms survive in English, most visibly in Peking duck, a dish that still carries the older transliteration.
This difference is crucial when we deal with proper nouns. A brand, a personal name, or a place does not always need a new meaning in another language, it just needs to be pronounced and recognized.
Names That Change Shape
Personal names are among the most common subjects of transliteration. If your name is Muhammad, it might appear as Mohammed, Mohamed, or even Mehmet depending on the country and script. These variations reflect different alphabets, regional accents, and phonetic rules.
The same is true in reverse. The English name โGeorgeโ becomes โJorgeโ in Spanish and โGeorgiosโ in Greek. All of these versions stem from the same root, but transliteration bends them to fit the sounds available in each language.
Brands That Cross Borders
Global brands rely heavily on transliteration to maintain identity. Coca-Cola famously encountered challenges when entering the Chinese market. Early attempts at transliteration produced characters that sounded like โbite the wax tadpole.โ After much refinement, the company settled on Kฤkวu Kฤlรจ, which both approximates the sound โCoca-Colaโ and means โtasty and joyful.โ This dual success is rare, since transliteration usually sacrifices meaning for sound.
Nike, meanwhile, is pronounced โNai-keโ in Mandarin. The name was carefully chosen to be simple, phonetically close to the English, and free of unwanted associations. These choices show how much thought goes into something as seemingly straightforward as writing a name in a new script.
Politics and Power in Transliteration
Transliteration is not always neutral. Political systems often choose one standard over another to assert influence. In India, for example, place names once spelled under British rule, like Calcutta and Bombay, have officially shifted to Kolkata and Mumbai. These are closer to local pronunciations and serve as symbols of cultural independence.
Similarly, the Korean capital can be written as Seoul in English, but older texts used โSลulโ under different romanization systems. The choice of system reflects who has the authority to decide how sounds should be represented globally.
The Role of Systems
To avoid chaos, many countries and international organizations establish official transliteration systems. For Russian, there are multiple: scientific, ISO, and English-friendly systems that adapt to reader expectations. Arabic has similar challenges, as its sounds often do not map neatly onto the Latin alphabet. The word for Islamic law might appear as โSharia,โ โShariโa,โ or โShariyah,โ depending on the system.
Competing transliteration systems can also create confusion in scholarship, media, and international diplomacy. For example, historical texts, maps, and news outlets may use different spellings for the same place or person, making research and reporting inconsistent. Without a unified standard, even widely recognized names can appear in multiple forms, complicating communication across borders.
Yet even with systems in place, usage rarely stays consistent. Local habits, historical spellings, and personal preferences all shape how words appear across languages. This explains why you might encounter both โBeijingโ and โPeking,โ or โQuranโ and โKoran,โ in different contexts.
Why Transliteration Matters
At first glance, transliteration may seem like a small technical concern. Yet it shapes how we encounter the world. It affects whether a traveler finds the right train station, whether a global brand is embraced or mocked, and whether peopleโs names are respected in cross-cultural settings.
The next time you see a familiar name written differently abroad, you are witnessing transliteration at work. It is a reminder that words do not just carry meanings; they carry sounds, and those sounds have to be reinvented each time they cross an alphabetic border.
