What Is Transliteration? (And How It's Different From Translation)

Translation vs. Transliteration

Translation converts meaning from one language to another. Transliteration converts a word from one writing system to another while preserving how it sounds — the meaning doesn't come into it at all.

A simple way to see the difference: the Russian word for Russia’s capital city, Москва, can be translated into English as “Moscow” (an established English name for the city, a genuine translation) or transliterated as “Moskva” (a letter-by-letter rendering of the Russian sound into Latin script, not a translation at all).

Where Transliteration Shows Up on Documents

Transliteration matters most for personal names, place names, and other proper nouns that don’t have an established English equivalent. An Arabic name like محمد doesn’t get translated into some other word — it gets transliterated into Latin letters (commonly “Muhammad,” though other spellings exist), preserving the sound and identity of the name rather than assigning it meaning.

This is exactly why name spelling on certified translations matters so much. A name transliterated one way on your passport and a different, equally valid way on a translated birth certificate isn’t a translation error exactly — both spellings can be “correct” transliterations — but the inconsistency itself can raise questions when an official is comparing documents side by side.

What This Means for Your Documents

• Names, addresses, and place names on a certified translation are typically transliterated, not translated — they stay recognizable as the same name, not converted into an English equivalent.
• When you have multiple documents translated over time or by different translators, it's worth flagging your name's preferred spelling upfront so it stays consistent across all of them.
• If your name has already been transliterated a specific way on an official document (a passport, for example), that's usually the spelling worth matching on any new translation.