What is Address Transliteration?

Introduction

Imagine that you have the following customer addresses from all over the world in your database:

• 221B Baker Street, London, UK
• 中国北京市东城区 32, 前门大街32号
• Дворцовая площадь д. 2, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия
• 대한민국 서울특별시 용산구 이태원로55길 60-16
• 23 ნიკოლოზ ბარათაშვილის ქუჩა, თბილისი 0105, საქართველო
• 2 เจริญกรุง 30 แขวงบางรัก เขตบางรัก กรุงเทพมหานคร 10500 ไทย

You would probably have no trouble reading the first address, which is written in a Latin-based alphabet, one of many writing systems existing in the world. However, I assume that the other five could cause some confusion if you are not familiar with their respective writing systems.

To be able to read and process those addresses, it would be useful to convert all of them to one standard alphabet. This is where transliteration comes to the rescue.

Transliteration is the process of converting text from one writing system to another while keeping the original pronunciation. This process is different from translation, where the intention is to preserve the meaning of the original word.

If we are using the data from the example above, the third row “Дворцовая площадь д. 2, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия” could be transliterated to Latin alphabet as “Dvortsovaya ploshchad’ d. 2, g. Sankt-Peterburg, Rossiya”, while the translation would be “Palace Square 2, Saint Petersburg, Russia”.

Transliteration is crucial for overcoming various challenges posed by diverse languages and writing systems in international addressing. This article will cover the advantages and pitfalls of address transliteration, common use cases, and some useful tools and techniques for transliteration.

Advantages of Address Transliteration

Accessibility:

• Transliteration allows addresses written in non-Latin scripts to be understood by those using Latin-based languages, which is particularly useful for global businesses, shipping companies, and travelers. It enhances cross-border communication, enabling businesses and individuals in different countries to read and understand addresses in a more familiar script.

Ease of Processing:

• Many international databases, postal systems, or e-commerce platforms rely on the Latin alphabet. Transliteration allows these systems to process foreign addresses without requiring substantial changes to their infrastructure.

• Transliteration allows users to input addresses into web forms that may not support multiple scripts, facilitating global commerce and communication.

Standardization:

• Transliteration provides a standardized approach to converting addresses from different scripts into a uniform format, making it easier to manage and maintain address data across regions with different languages and scripts.

Disadvantages of Address Transliteration

Loss of Precision:

• Some languages contain sounds or characters that do not have an exact match in the Latin alphabet, leading to imprecise or ambiguous transliterations. For example, in Semitic languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, vowels are not used in writing, which makes transliteration difficult. For example, the name of the country Qatar in Arabic would be “قطر”, which transliterates as “Qtr”.

Complexity of Standards:

• Various transliteration standards (such as ISO, BGC/PCGN, or local government standards) can have different transliterations for the same character. This lack of a single global standard can cause confusion or errors. For instance, a Russian character “Й” is transliterated as “Y” in BGN/PCGN system but as “I” in the Russian international travel documents.

• Implementing multiple transliteration standards within one platform or database can add complexity to the system’s design and functionality.

Challenges in Reverse Transliteration:

• Transliteration is usually a one-way operation, which means that converting back from a transliterated form to the original script is often not accurate. That can cause issues in contexts where an exact match is required, such as legal documents or formal communications.

Common Use Cases

Address transliteration has several critical use cases, particularly in global business operations and international communication.

Global Address Verification

One of the most significant use cases is in address verification and validation. Companies operating globally need to ensure that customer addresses are accurate and standardized. Address transliteration helps convert addresses from various scripts into a common Latin script, enabling the verification process to be more efficient and reliable. For example, addresses in Simplified Chinese or Arabic can be transliterated into Latin characters, making it easier to validate and standardize them according to the local postal codes and address formats.

Customer Onboarding and CRM Systems

In customer relationship management (CRM) systems, address transliteration is vital for handling customer data from diverse linguistic backgrounds. Transliteration helps in converting these addresses into a format that the CRM system can handle, ensuring that the data is clean, consistent, and usable. This enhances the overall customer experience by facilitating smoother onboarding and communication processes.

Logistics and Shipping

For logistics and shipping companies, accurate address transliteration is essential for ensuring that packages are delivered to the correct locations. By converting addresses into a standardized format, companies can reduce errors in delivery and improve the efficiency of their operations. This is particularly important in regions where multiple scripts are used, such as in countries with both Latin and non-Latin alphabets.

Data Quality and Hygiene

Maintaining high-quality data is essential for any organization, and address transliteration plays a key role in this. By standardizing addresses across different scripts, companies can ensure that their databases are consistent and accurate. This helps in improving data hygiene and reducing errors that could arise from incompatible character sets.

Transliteration Tips and Tricks

This section will look into tips, tricks, and tools for addressing transliteration.

Standardized Transliteration Systems

Arabic to English: ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN, UNGEGN, ISO 233

Chinese to English:

• Standard Mandarin: Hanyu Pinyin

• Beijing Mandarin: Wade Giles, Yale

• Cantonese: Yale

Japanese to English: Hepburn, Kunrei-shiki (ISO 3602), Nihon-shiki (ISO 3602 Strict)

Russian to English: ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN, ICAO, ISO 9:1995

Transliteration Tools and Software

Online Transliteration Tools:

• Websites like Lexilogos or Omniglot offer transliteration utilities.
• Google Translate can transliterate text in certain languages.

Software and APIs:

• Use programming libraries like ICU Transliteration in Java or unidecode in Python for automated processes.
• APIs from services like Google Cloud Translation or Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services support transliteration features.

Manual Transliteration:

• For critical or complex addresses, consider manual transliteration by a professional who is fluent in both scripts to capture nuances and ensure accuracy.

Transliteration Example in Python Using unidecode Library

The unidecode library in Python transliterates Unicode text into ASCII characters, making it useful for converting non-Latin scripts to Latin-based approximations.

Important: unidecode does not adhere to a specific transliteration standard mentioned in the section above, so the output can be different from what you could expect.

Example: Transliterating an Address from Russian Alphabet to Latin

from unidecode import unidecode

# Original address in Russian
original_address = "Дворцовая площадь д. 2, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия"

# Transliterated address
transliterated_address = unidecode(original_address)

# Output the results
print("Original Address:", original_address)
print("Transliterated Address:", transliterated_address)

Output:

Original Address: Дворцовая площадь д. 2, г. Санкт-Петербург, Россия
Transliterated Address: Dvortsovaia ploshchad' d. 2, g. Sankt-Peterburg, Rossiia

Conclusion

Address transliteration ensures that addresses are accurately converted from one alphabet or script to another, preserving their phonetic representation. This is essential for enhancing cross-border logistics, improving data integrity, and facilitating seamless communication across different languages.

However dealing with various languages is hard enough for a couple of countries. If you need quality data globally, outsourcing those efforts to a trusty data provider will save you both time and money. At GeoPostcodes, we have already set up all these processes to aggregate postal data for more than ten years. We ingest over 1500 data sources to build our worldwide databases.

All the data is cleaned, normalized, and pushed to a unified data model. We keep track of the changes on the postal and administrative sides, link to several external sources (e.g., geocodes, UNLOCODES, time zones), and publish weekly updates. We will also answer your questions about national administrative and postal structures as we aggregated and curated all that data. Browse GeoPostcodes datasets and download a free sample here.

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