News on International Transliteration Standards

Citation

(1998), "News on International Transliteration Standards", Asian Libraries, Vol. 7 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1998.17307dab.013

News on International Transliteration Standards

News on International Transliteration Standards

Provided by John Clews, Chair of ISO/TC46/SC2

The International Organization for Standardisation subcommittee responsible for transliteration (ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages) met from 12-14 May 1997 at the British Standards Institution in Chiswick, London, to review international standards in this area - both already published and under development, and next meets in Athens during the period 11-15 May 1998.

Despite computing standards like ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode, there will always be a need for transliteration as long as people do not have the same level of competence in all scripts besides the script used in their mother tongue, and may have a need to deal with these languages, or when they have to deal with mechanical or computerised equipment which does not provide all the scripts of characters that they need.

The Chair (John Clews) and Secretary (Evangelos Melagrakis from Greece) intend to make transliteration and ISO/TC46/SC2 far more visible and far more relevant to end users than it has been in the past. To enable this, an electronic mailing list for ISO/TC46/SC2 ( tc46sc2@elot.gr ) and an associated Web site (located at www.elot.gr/tc46sc2) has now been set up by ELOT (the Greek national standards body). We hope this list will attract researchers and scientists who can add useful information which might assist in developing standards on the Conversion of Written Languages.

The scope of transliteration work in ISO/TC46/SC2's working groups is as follows:

WG1: Transliteration of Cyrillic (work now combined with that of WG5)

WG2: Transliteration of Arabic (work now combined with that of WG11)

WG3: Transliteration of Hebrew

WG4: Transliteration of Korean

WG5: Transliteration of Greek, Armenian, Georgian and Cyrillic

WG6: Transliteration of Chinese

WG7: Transliteration of Japanese

WG8: Transliteration and computers

WG9: Transliteration of Thai

WG10: Transliteration of Mongolian

WG11: Transliteration of Perso-Arabic script

WG12: Transliteration of Indic scripts

The tc46sc2@elot.gr List on Transliteration

There are quite a few with an interest in transliteration in library catalogues on the list, but there are other potential users of transliteration too. One major advantage of e-mail is the ability to involve far more people in the development of a common purpose than were involved before, to get user feedback, and expert opinion from various sources. There are now over 300 subscribers to tc46sc2@elot.gr , from more than 40 countries, providing a global interest group in this area.

Subscribing to the Mailing List for ISO/TC46/SC2

In order to join the list, send an email to majordomo@elot.gr with this message in the body of the text: 'subscribe tc46sc2 your@email.address' (but with your real email address replacing the string 'your@email.address').

To find out further commands you can use, send the command 'help' as the text of an email either to tc46sc2-request@elot.gr or to: majordomo@elot.gr . To unsubscribe,send the command 'unsubscribe' instead, omitting the quote marks in all cases. This will tell you how to obtain copies of past messages and other useful features.

Once you have subscribed, you can send messages to tc46sc2@elot.gr and receive messages from other members of the list. Please reply where possible to the list as a whole so that all can benefit; using the Group Reply function (pressing G on some e-mail software) is the simplest way to achieve this.

Other members will also be interested to see who else is joining the list, so it is useful to send a brief introduction (say, one or two short paragraphs) to tc46sc2@elot.gr at the outset, saying what languages, scripts and other things you are involved in. That is the most likely way to stimulate others to write on the subjects you are interested in!

Queries may be directed to the John Clews (Chair of ISO/TC46/SC2: Conversion of Written Languages) at Converse@sesame.demon.co.uk .