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Arabic transcription replaces Arabic letters with Roman letters or combinations to approximate the correct sound. Challenges include limited Roman equivalents and variations in results. Vowel sounds must be added, and specialized companies offer transcription services.
Arabic transcription is the act of transcribing Arabic text into romanized form. The core of the method is to replace Arabic letters with their equivalent Roman letters whenever possible. In other cases, letter combinations can be used to approximate the correct sound. This process focuses on how the language sounds, rather than trying to do a letter-by-letter match.
There are several challenges associated with Arabic transcription. The only letters in the Roman alphabet that clearly correspond to the letters in the Arabic alphabet are B, F, K, L, M, N, R, and Z. There are also some sounds in the Arabic language that do not have a Roman letter equivalent. The letters S, D, H and T have more than one Arabic letter that essentially produce the same sound.
Because there are so many variables in Arabic transcription, results from various transcribers can vary greatly. This is why particular words and names that have been translated from Arabic into the Roman alphabet can have many variations. For this reason, there have been several attempts to create a standard for this type of transcription. Historically, certain standards have been accepted in limited areas or by specific groups, but there has been no globally accepted method.
One of the most challenging aspects of Arabic transcription is translating vowel sounds. The vowel is not written in Arabic languages. To correctly pronounce the words, the sound must be added by the reader. The same applies to transcription, as the translator must know when to insert vowels in the romanized version of the text.
An opposite process to transcription is transliteration. This is a translation process where each letter has a counterpart. It is based on what the printed language looks like, not what it looks like. This can be extremely difficult to do with Arabic translation as there are few letters with a Roman counterpart.
There are several companies that offer Arabic transcription services. In order to properly transcribe the nuances of the language used in different fields, transcriptionists often specialize in certain areas of the language, such as the legal, financial, and medical fields. These companies specialize in avoiding many of the pitfalls of transcription, such as misinterpreting similar symbols, translating without vowel sounds, and compensating for elements of the Arabic language that don’t have a Roman equivalent.
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