Arabic Transliteration and the Bluebook
First, I hate transliteration of Arabic words into English. I find it pedantic, pretentious, bewildering, time consuming and most of all, deeply and fundamentally unnecessary--in short academic jargon at its worst. So the next bastard that puts a dot below the first letter of my first or last name, prepare for an ass kicking. You write it like that, and people who don't speak Arabic wonder what the heck is supposed to mean, and all of a sudden, they can't say my name any more. People who do speak Arabic but aren't familiar with transliteration get confused too with all the dots and the funny lines and the apostrophes in every direction, though they just ignore them and come to the right answer pretty quickly. People familiar with both Arabic and transliteration do not need them, so the only people left are hard core Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies academics, and only to the extent that their Arabic isn't good, or (more often) to the extent that they wish to show the world how brilliant they are via lettering that looks complex and sophisticated but really reveals almost nothing beyond what basic familiarity with Arabic would reveal anyway.
Honestly, if you don't know which "h" belongs in "jihad", then you don't know Arabic and there's no point to it. Except, of course, to get you to say the word in English in some reasonable fashion that isn't ridiculous (oh, and EYE-raq for Iraq is ridiculous), but that is easier done without dots and funny lines so as to satisfy the novice as well. And that goes equally well by the way as for words where the transliteration might be the same for different words under my simplified rules. I had an academic colleague once circle mihna sharifa when I wrote it--aha, she said, the perfect example of why I had better transliterate properly, which mihna did I mean? Caught! Except the sentence read "Ja'far al-Sadr though not a jurist himself still regarded the pursuit of juristic study to be a . . . . mihna sharifa, and said as much on several occasions recently. So really? You weren't sure whether I meant mihna as in "profession" or mihna as in "misfortune"? You thought it was "noble misfortune"? Besides which the three dots above were the words "noble profession." Because one of the few things more pretentious and insufferable in academic writing than transliteration is an insistence on not translating words, as if those who don't speak a language aren't entitled to learn from the piece. That I find so insufferable I won't allow publication in my name if a journal insists on it and have pulled nearly complete articles in protest. (To be clear, not in law reviews, which don't do this.) If my students cannot read it, I don't want to write it.
But if I hate transliteration as it exists, still clearly some form of reasonable moving of the word from Arabic to English is warranted, by which I mean it need not be rigid or formulaic, but a reasonable approximation of the word as properly written such that a novice might attempt a reasonable Anglification of it. And so with that we come to the Bluebook. How does it tell me to write the Constitution of Iraq, such that I've been forced to transliterate it in a decidedly preposterous fashion twice now in two different journals?
Doustour Joumhouriat al-Iraq
Now this is I have to say is so bad it does not meet my standard as expressed in the initial paragraph, the novice is almost certain to get it wrong. In fact, I'm quite confused as to how this could be the collective wisdom of our top law schools--who in heaven's name did they ask to get this? I'm guessing you'd read the above DOWSTOWER JOWMHOWRIYAT . . . . which to be clear wouldn't be close.
The first "ou" is the same sound as the u "mushy", or similar enough. Why ou is used for that is a mystery. Moushy? The second ou in the second word would be the u in gum. OU is even worse there. Would any sensible person pronounce gum close to properly if spelled goum? The final "ou" is I guess the closest, but it would be the vowel sound in zoom, which 'ou' doesn't too terribly well.
Why not just tell the Bluebook editors they messed up rather badly and they need to get it right? I could, I might before the next edition, but as noted I've been forced to transliterate with this horrible thing, I cannot for understandable reasons convince law review editors to depart from the Bluebook on the grounds that my Arabic is better than whoever they consulted, and I need it recorded that if that transliteration appears in my name, as it has, it's over my strong protest, so that I can credibly continue to despise transliteration without making it seem like I'm making a farce out of the words.
HAH
Honestly, if you don't know which "h" belongs in "jihad", then you don't know Arabic and there's no point to it. Except, of course, to get you to say the word in English in some reasonable fashion that isn't ridiculous (oh, and EYE-raq for Iraq is ridiculous), but that is easier done without dots and funny lines so as to satisfy the novice as well. And that goes equally well by the way as for words where the transliteration might be the same for different words under my simplified rules. I had an academic colleague once circle mihna sharifa when I wrote it--aha, she said, the perfect example of why I had better transliterate properly, which mihna did I mean? Caught! Except the sentence read "Ja'far al-Sadr though not a jurist himself still regarded the pursuit of juristic study to be a . . . . mihna sharifa, and said as much on several occasions recently. So really? You weren't sure whether I meant mihna as in "profession" or mihna as in "misfortune"? You thought it was "noble misfortune"? Besides which the three dots above were the words "noble profession." Because one of the few things more pretentious and insufferable in academic writing than transliteration is an insistence on not translating words, as if those who don't speak a language aren't entitled to learn from the piece. That I find so insufferable I won't allow publication in my name if a journal insists on it and have pulled nearly complete articles in protest. (To be clear, not in law reviews, which don't do this.) If my students cannot read it, I don't want to write it.
But if I hate transliteration as it exists, still clearly some form of reasonable moving of the word from Arabic to English is warranted, by which I mean it need not be rigid or formulaic, but a reasonable approximation of the word as properly written such that a novice might attempt a reasonable Anglification of it. And so with that we come to the Bluebook. How does it tell me to write the Constitution of Iraq, such that I've been forced to transliterate it in a decidedly preposterous fashion twice now in two different journals?
Doustour Joumhouriat al-Iraq
Now this is I have to say is so bad it does not meet my standard as expressed in the initial paragraph, the novice is almost certain to get it wrong. In fact, I'm quite confused as to how this could be the collective wisdom of our top law schools--who in heaven's name did they ask to get this? I'm guessing you'd read the above DOWSTOWER JOWMHOWRIYAT . . . . which to be clear wouldn't be close.
The first "ou" is the same sound as the u "mushy", or similar enough. Why ou is used for that is a mystery. Moushy? The second ou in the second word would be the u in gum. OU is even worse there. Would any sensible person pronounce gum close to properly if spelled goum? The final "ou" is I guess the closest, but it would be the vowel sound in zoom, which 'ou' doesn't too terribly well.
Why not just tell the Bluebook editors they messed up rather badly and they need to get it right? I could, I might before the next edition, but as noted I've been forced to transliterate with this horrible thing, I cannot for understandable reasons convince law review editors to depart from the Bluebook on the grounds that my Arabic is better than whoever they consulted, and I need it recorded that if that transliteration appears in my name, as it has, it's over my strong protest, so that I can credibly continue to despise transliteration without making it seem like I'm making a farce out of the words.
HAH
I came across this post while searching about transliteration. as you said, its really a pain in the neck especially if you learned English at later stage!
there are online tolls but most of them are helpless as they follow no standard. However, yesterday, I found a utility application that lets you automatically or manually transliterate your text from Arabic into English, using the writing-based model of the Arabic orthography, compatible with the ALA-LC transliteration scheme with slight modifications. I am using it now but you may need to make some amendments but at least is following a standard. but there is still a problem if I want to publish in a journal which follows a different transliteration system.
http://rotas.iium.edu.my/
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Thanks. And sorry for the delay in posting this valuable comment. It had a website in it and so was mistakenly by the system thrown into spam.
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