Romanized

Romanized is the adjective describing text rendered in the Latin alphabet using a romanization system. It is commonly applied to words or names from languages written in non-Latin scripts, such as Chinese characters, Arabic script, Cyrillic, Japanese kana, or Korean Hangul.

Romanization can refer to transliteration (a letter-for-letter conversion) or transcription (an approximate rendering of pronunciation). In practice, many systems aim to balance legibility, phonetic usefulness, and reversibility, but different systems can yield different spellings for the same word.

Several well-known romanization schemes exist. For Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin is widely used internationally, with Wade-Giles as a historical alternative. Japanese romanization includes Hepburn, Kunrei-shiki, and Nihon-shiki. Korean uses McCune-Reischauer and the Revised Romanization. For Cyrillic languages, ISO 9 and ALA-LC provide standardized transliteration, while Arabic has schemes such as DIN 31635 and various library standards. Romanization is common in education, travel, publishing, and library catalogs, where it aids search and indexing.

Uses and challenges include enabling international communication, data entry, and cross-language search. Challenges arise from multiple competing systems, variation in whether diacritics are preserved, and the potential for ambiguity when foreign spelling is rendered without cues to pronunciation. Automated transliteration can misrepresent names with irregular spellings or language-specific conventions.

Historically tied to linguistic research and cataloging needs, romanization continues to evolve with digital text processing and globalization, supporting multilingual information access while preserving connections to original scripts.