Transliterally

Transliterally refers to a practice of transliteration that emphasizes a direct, letter-for-letter rendering of text from one script into another, aiming to retain the appearance and structure of the source text rather than its pronunciation or idiomatic meaning.

Coined as a portmanteau of transliteration and literally, the term is used in linguistic discussions and online discussions to describe strict transliteration approaches and to contrast them with more phonetic or localized renderings.

Practitioners use mapping schemes that assign each source-script character to a corresponding target-script symbol, preserve punctuation, capitalization, and diacritics when possible, and may include notes about exceptions for script-specific features.

Examples include rendering the Cyrillic word Москва as Moskva under common systems; the form preserves the letter count and general shapes of the source text while yielding a readable Latin-script rendering.

Applications span digital typography, archival work, education, and cross-cultural communication. It is not a substitute for translation and can limit readability or introduce ambiguity when scripts have multiple acceptable mappings.

See also transliteration, transcription, romanization, localization.