The transliteration element seems useful, but I think that even that element needs to carry a language notation. What if we have a title, whose native title is in hebrew, but it has several transliterations, one in arabic, one in latin-1. Cheers, Rick Silterra Karen Coyle noted: So I think that the idea of a title block where multiple versions of the same title can be kept together is the best one: <titleBlock> <title lang="ch">vernacular title</title> <title translit="pinyin">here's the pinyin title</title> <title lang="en">English title for same item</title> </titleBlock> That's it conceptually, at least. Someone else needs to do the right and formal XML.