5.1 Transliteration

Transliterating a word does not tell you the meaning of the word. It tells you how the how the word is pronounced in a foreign language. This makes the language a little more accessible to people who are unfamiliar with the alphabet of the foreign language. This is opposed to translation, which, put in simple terms, gives you the meaning of a word that’s written in another language. For example, the greeting in Arabic is translated as greeting in Arabic in the Arabic script but is transliterated in the Latin script as shukraan.

General transforms provide a general-purpose package for processing Unicode text. They are a powerful and flexible mechanism for handling a variety of different tasks, including:

• Uppercase, lowercase, or title-case conversions

• Normalization

• Hex and character name conversions

• Script-to-script conversion

The reference data sources supported by Customer Screening are all provided in the Latin character set, and some in the original scripts. The screening process can also be used with non-Latin data. Non-Latin data can be screened against the Latin reference data sources which are supported by performing transliteration of data from the non-Latin character set to the Latin character set.

Non-Latin customer data can be screened against non-Latin reference data without any changes to the product, although certain fuzzy text matching algorithms may not be as effective when used to match data with the non-Latin character set. Text is processed on a left-to-right basis.