Orthographic transcription is a transcription method that employs the standard spelling system of each target language. Examples of orthographic transcription are "Pushkin" and "Pouchkine", respectively the English and French orthographic transcriptions of the surname "Пу́шкин" in the name Алекса́ндр Пу́шкин. Thus, each target language transcribes the surname according to its own orthography. Contrast with phonetic transcription, phonemic orthography, transliteration, and translation.
Distinction from transliteration
Transcription as a mapping from sound to script must be distinguished from transliteration, which creates a mapping from one script to another that is designed to match the original script as directly as possible. Standard transcription schemes for linguistic purposes include the International Phonetic Alphabet, and its ASCII equivalent, SAMPA. Transcription is often confused with transliteration, perhaps due to a common journalistic practice of mixing elements of both in rendering foreign names. The resulting practical transcription is a hybrid that is called both "transcription" and "transliteration" by the general public. The table below shows examples of phonetic transcription of the name of the former Russian president known in English as Boris Yeltsin, followed by accepted hybrid forms in various languages. English speakers will pronounce "Boris" differently from the original Russian, so it is a transliteration rather than a transcription in the strict sense. The same words are likely to be transcribed differently under different systems. For example, the Mandarin Chinese name for the capital of the People's Republic of China is Beijing using the commonly used contemporary system Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, but in the historically significantWade–Giles system, it is written Pei-Ching. Practical transcription can be done into a non-alphabetic language too. For example, in a Hong Kong newspaper, George Bush's name is transliterated into two Chinese characters that sound like "Bou-sū" by using the characters that mean "cloth" and "special". Similarly, many words from English and other Western European languages are borrowed in Japanese and are transcribed using Katakana, one of the Japanese syllabaries.
one or both languages may develop further. The original correspondence between the sounds of the two languages may change, and so the pronunciation of the transcribed word develops in a different direction from the original pronunciation.
the transcribed word may be adopted as a loanword in another language with the same script. This often leads to a pronunciation and spelling which are different from a direct transcription.
This is especially evident for Greek loanwords and proper names. Greek words were historically first transcribed to Latin, and then loaned into other languages, and finally the loanword has developed according to the rules of the target language. For example, Aristotle is the currently used English form of the name of the philosopher whose name in Greek is spelled ̓Aριστoτέλης, which was transcribed to Latin Aristoteles, from where it was loaned into other languages and followed their linguistic development. Pliocene, a much more recent word, comes from the Greek words πλείων and καινóς, which were first transcribed to plion and caenus and then loaned into other languages. When this process continues over several languages, it may fail miserably to convey the original pronunciation. One ancient example is the Sanskrit word dhyāna which was transcribed into the Chinese word ch'anna through Buddhist scriptures; next shortened into ch'an. Ch'an, pronounced zen in Japanese, used as the name of the Buddhist sect of "Chan", was transcribed from Japanese to zen in English. Dhyāna to zen is quite a change. Another issue is any subsequent change in "preferred" transcription. For instance, the word describing a philosophy or religion in China was popularized in English as Tao and given the termination -ism to produce an English word Taoism. That transcription reflects the Wade–Giles system. More recent Pinyin transliterations produce Dao and Daoism.
