Transliteration vs. Transcription: What’s the Difference?

Have you ever picked up a history book and read about the philosophy of Taoism, only to open a modern textbook and see it spelled Daoism? Or perhaps you recall older maps labeling the Chinese capital as Peking, while today every flight board reads Beijing. You might have even seen the name of the Russian playwright written as Chekhov, Tchekhov, or even Čechov.

Is the spelling changing because the language is changing? Usually, the answer is no. The spoken word remains the same; what changes is the bridge building between two different writing systems.

This confusion stems from two distinct, linguistic processes that most people use interchangeably but actually serve very different purposes: transcription and transliteration. Understanding the difference doesn’t just help you score points at trivia night—it is a crucial tool for language learners trying to master the pronunciation and orthography of non-Latin script languages like Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, or Japanese.

The Core Distinction: Ear vs. Eye

To put it simply, the difference lies in the source material. Are you converting the sound of the language, or are you converting the letters?

• Transcription is about the sound (phonemes). It attempts to map the spoken sounds of one language into the best matching written symbols of another language so that a reader can pronounce it primarily correctly.
• Transliteration is about the spelling (graphemes). It maps the letters of one alphabet to the corresponding letters of another alphabet, character by character. Ideally, transliteration is reversible—you should be able to reconstruct the original spelling perfectly.

Deep Dive: Transcription (Mapping Sounds)

Imagine a journalist in Cairo interviewing a local. The journalist speaks English; the local speaks Arabic. When the local says his name, the journalist writes it down in his notebook. The journalist isn’t thinking about Arabic spelling rules; he is listening to the acoustic vibrations and trying to represent them with English letters.

This is transcription. It is concerned with how it sounds.

The most precise form of transcription is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Linguists use this system to represent uniform sounds across all human languages. For example, the English word “shoe” is transcribed in IPA as /ʃuː/. The “sh” sound is represented by ʃ and the “oo” sound by u.

However, broadly speaking, when we see “Quran” vs. “Koran”, or “Muslim” vs. “Moslem”, we are seeing different attempts at phonetic transcription (or Romanization) where authors are disagreeing on which English letters best approximate the Arabic vowels.

Deep Dive: Transliteration (Mapping Letters)

Now, imagine a librarian cataloging Russian books for an American university. If she relies on how the title “sounds”, she might run into trouble, because pronunciation can vary by accent, but the spelling on the book jacket is permanent.

She needs a system where every Cyrillic letter has an exact Latin equivalent. If the Russian letter is ч (which sounds like ‘ch’), a strict academic transliteration system might assign it the symbol č. Even if the reader doesn’t know that č sounds like “ch”, the system is perfect because it preserves the original orthography.

This is transliteration. It is concerned with how it is written.

A great example is Greek. The Greek name Φίλιππος matches letter-for-letter to Philippos.

Φ = Ph

ί = i

λ = l

ι = i

π = p

π = p

ο = o

ς = s

If we were transcribing based on modern Greek pronunciation (where ‘ph’ is an ‘f’ sound and the ‘ippos’ might sound slightly different), we might write Filippos. But the transliteration preserves the history and the visual makeup of the word.

The Great Chinese Puzzle: Wade-Giles vs. Pinyin

This brings us to one of the most famous points of confusion in linguistic history: the Romanization of Mandarin Chinese. Why did “Peking” become “Beijing”? Why did “Tao” become “Dao”?

This is a battle of systems. Neither Wade-Giles nor Pinyin are “translations”—they are systems of representing Chinese characters using the Latin alphabet.

The Contender: Wade-Giles

Developed in the mid-19th century by British diplomats Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles, this system was the standard for the English-speaking world for a long time. The Wade-Giles system was created by ears attuned to English phonetics, but it used a specialized convention for “voiced” vs. “unvoiced” sounds that confuses modern readers.

In Mandarin, there are sounds similar to “B” and “P”. However, to a linguist, the main difference between them isn’t just the sound, but the “aspiration” (the puff of breath of air).

Mandarin has a “P” sound (explosive puff of air) and a “B” sound (no puff of air).

Wade-Giles decided to write them both as “P”.

If there was a puff of air, he added an apostrophe: P’.

If there was no puff of air (the “B” sound), he left it as: P.

So, the capital city (which sounds like it starts with a B) was written as Pei-ching. Readers were supposed to know that an un-apostrophized ‘P’ makes a ‘B’ sound. But most laypeople ignored the rules, ignored the apostrophes, and just read “Pei-ching” with a hard English P. This eventually morphed through postal maps into “Peking.”

The Champion: Hanyu Pinyin

In the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China developed Hanyu Pinyin. They realized the confusion caused by apostrophes. They decided to map the sounds to distinct Latin letters, even if those letters didn’t perfectly match English intuition.

• The aspirated sound became P.
• The unaspirated sound became B.

Therefore, Pei-ching became Beijing. Taoism (with a ‘T’ sound that functions like a ‘D’) became Daoism. Kung Fu became Gongfu.

Pinyin is essentially a phonemic transcription system standardized as the official alphabet for Mandarin. It is much more accurate for learners, provided you learn the rules (like knowing that ‘Q’ sounds like ‘Che’ and ‘X’ sounds like ‘She’).

Why Does This Matter for Language Learners?

Understanding the difference between transcription and transliteration is usually the first hurdle in learning a language with a different script. If you rely too heavily on “transliterations” found in tourist guidebooks (which are often clumsy transcriptions), you will develop a horrific accent.

For example, if you are learning Japanese, you utilize Romaji (Romanization). But if you see the word syosin, that is a strict transliteration of the hiragana characters. If you pronounce it “sigh-o-sin”, you are wrong. A transcription-based approach (like the Hepburn system) would write it as shoshin, which helps you pronounce it correctly.

Three Tips for Navigation

1. Don’t Trust English Sounds: Just because a “transcribed” word uses Latin letters doesn’t mean those letters make English sounds. In Pinyin, ‘C’ sounds like ‘ts’. In Turkish, ‘C’ sounds like ‘j’. Always learn the key to the specific Romanization system you are using.
2. Distinguish the Goal: Are you trying to spell the word in the original language, or represent the sound? If you are a librarian, you need transliteration. If you are a speaker, you need strict phonetic transcription.
3. Accept the Ambiguity: When you see names like Zelensky vs. Zelenskyy vs. Zelenskij, realize that no one is wrong. They are simply using different mechanisms to pull Cyrillic across the border into Latin script.

Language is messy, but the tools we use to analyze it attempt to bring order to the chaos. Whether you are mapping the precise architecture of a word through transliteration or capturing the music of a word through transcription, you are engaging in the fascinating act of linguistic translation.