Subject: Re: (i18n.392) Transliteration standards: possible impact on internationaliz ation

From: Alain LaBonté - 2 <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 07:41:39 -0500

A 03:20 19/11/97 -0500, [email-masked] a écrit :
>Eh.....what kind of language would you characterize French transliterated
>into Hebrew as?
>Is there a difference between Hebrew transliterated into French and
>Hebrew transliterated into English?

[Alain] :
Yes, most definitely imho. We went through this, for example, in making the
French version of Hebrew letters in ISO/IEC 10646. I do not believe that
people can accept that transliteration into a script be naturally readable
only in one language of a given script, beyond transcription. 

Such rules are absolutely not the same in English and in French. And for
transliterating Hebrew into French, it is important to respect these
differences. 

The problem of the Latin script, in essence, is that it is almost totally
independent of language in its primary signs, the alphabet. But that is the
only commonality, and in some sense, a nuisance. Ideally we ought to
consider that each Latin-script-based language has its own alphabet,
distinct from another one. In this case, this problem would not occur... we
should talks about transliterating Hebrew into the English script
(alphabet), into the French script (alphabet) and so on.

Alain LaBonté
Cairo