Transliteration Survey
Michael McKenna - California Digital Library, University of California
Intended Audience: Managers
Session Level: Beginner, Intermediate
In the expanding European Union, a majority of people speak at least two languages. Even so, official documents, phone books, bibliographic records, and other digital repositories may need to present native language source information (e.g., Russian or Greek) in a transliterated form to allow it to be interpreted by someone who does not speak or read that language. This paper will present a survey of issues confronting the language engineer along with solutions and available technologies.
We will look at historical standards and contexts in which the standards become useless. We will then look at early work funded by the Directorate General for Research of the European Union (DG-XIII, 4th Framework), then on to solutions provided by Java and software libraries. We'll finish by taking a look at some commercial universal names databases and the technology behind them.