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It is often possible to transl[iter]ate from a transliteration back into the vernacular. In fact, with ALA-LC transliteration of Russian, you can do so fairly accurately. There is a slight problem with the use of Roman numerals in Russian. "NBAH I" gets transliterated as "IVAN I" but the reversal changes the Roman "I" to a Cyrillic "I" (which I represented by the Roman letter "N" above). This is a problem for "I", "IX" and "V" which are the words "and", "their", and "in" in Russian, respectively--very common words which would reconvert back to the vernacular very badly when they had started out as Roman numerals. One could do pretty well with all the other Roman numerals because there is no Russian word "XIII", "VII", "IV", etc. For other scripts, the reversal is even better. It varies from script to script depending upon the transliteration scheme used. The ALA-LC schemes are quite a mixed bag. Each was developed in relative isolation of the others, thus one can't make ANY generalization about how reversable they are as a whole. Randy Barry (LC/NDMSO - compiler of the ALA-LC Romanization Tables) On Tue, 5 Nov 2002, Karen Coyle wrote: > With Western European languages it is (often) possible to translate from a > character set like ISO 8859-1 to the Unicode equivalent. But it is not > possible to translate from a *transliteration* of Chinese or Russian to the > vernacular characters of the original language. So my concern is not with > languages that use a latin-based script but with ones that do not. -------------------------------------------------- Randall K. Barry Library of Congress Network Development and MARC Standards Office 101 Independence Avenue, S.E. Washington, DC 20540-4402 U.S.A. TEL: +1-202-707-5118 FAX: +1-202-707-0115 NET: [log in to unmask] -------------------------------------------------- Ideas and opinions expressed in this communication are personal and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Library of Congress. --------------------------------------------------