PRODUCTS
A Microsoft Office plug-in to facilitate the accurate transliteration of Arabic names.
Basis Technology’s Transliteration Assistant enables users to interactively or automatically translate Arabic names to English, or standardize the spelling of Arabic names to any of four U.S. government transliteration standards and two public ones:
- Intelligence Community Standard for the Transliteration of Arabic Names (the “IC Standard”)
- U.S. Board on Geographic Names (“BGN”)
- Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System (“SATTS”)
- Foreign Broadcast Information Service (“FBIS”)
- Buckwalter (academic standard)
- Basis Technolgy (used by the Arabic Editor)
Use Transliteration Assistant interactively, standardizing the transliteration of Arabic names one at a time.
- Given these three names below, the user highlights one name at a time and selects "Standardize Personal Name" from the MS Office menu.
Mustafa Ahmed bin Samir al-haitham
Moustafa Ahmad bin Saameer alhaytham
Moustephah Ehmed ben Samire el-heythem - Transliteration Assistant provides a list of likely Arabic spellings behind the translations and the user chooses the correct one:
- Then the correct IC standard transliteration is automatically generated and inserted into the document:
Mustafa Ahmad Bin-Samir al-Haytham
The original Arabic spelling may also be preserved in a footnote, annotation, or attachment.
Transliteration Assistant may also be used to process large lists of names, such as those in a telephone book, in an automatic, “best guess” manner. The expected accuracy of names translated can be as high as 97%.
The system uses orthographic completion to insert vowels normally omitted in Arabic writing. This method results in more accurate transliteration of names than any naïve transliteration system—as used in most commercially available machine translation systems for transliterating names.
From Microsoft Word, Excel, or Access, the user selects lists of names to be translated and chooses the desired target transliteration standard (BGN, FBIS, IC, or SATTS). Transliteration Assistant is a force multiplier for analysts by reducing a job cycle from weeks to a few hours.
Transliteration Assistant may be used with names of places, as well as names of persons. When a place name is entered, a list of matches (both in Arabic and in BGN transliteration) and their coordinates are presented.
Place names may be annotated in reports with either latitude/longitude coordinates or the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS).
Transliteration Assistant may be used concurrently with GeoScope, Basis Technology’s map viewing application, to display selected locations on a map.
Transliteration Assistant includes the Knowledge Center, a powerful facility for centralized access to online reference materials, including dictionaries, word lists, gazetteers, and the CIA’s Chiefs of State database. Words, people, and places may be looked up by typing them in either English or Arabic, and the results may be quickly pasted back into the document being edited.