Transliteration is a mechanism for converting a word in a source (foreign) language to a target language, and often adopts approaches from machine translation. In machine translation, the objective is to preserve the semantic meaning of the utterance as much as possible while following the syntactic structure in the target language. In Transliteration, the objective is to preserve the original pronunciation of the source word as much as possible while following the phonological structures of the target language.

For example, the city’s name “Manchester” has become well known by people of languages other than English. These new words are often named entities that are important in cross-lingual information retrieval, information extraction, machine translation, and often present out-of-vocabulary challenges to spoken language technologies such as automatic speech recognition, spoken keyword search, and text-to-speech.

Source: Phonology-Augmented Statistical Framework for Machine Transliteration using Limited Linguistic Resources