--- title: "Transliteration" summary: "Transliteration maps text from one writing system into another — Cyrillic or Greek or Han into Latin script — so that names recorded in different alphabets can be compared at all." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/transliteration last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # Transliteration > Transliteration maps text from one writing system into another — Cyrillic or Greek or Han into Latin script — so that names recorded in different alphabets can be compared at all. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/transliteration Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Matching methods ## How to read this The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. [Filed under matching methods](https://entitybind.com/glossary#matching). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What transliteration means Transliteration is the mapping that rewrites a name from one writing system into another, so two records kept in different alphabets can be compared. A company registered in Athens, filed in Greek, may appear in a supplier master in Latin script, in three different romanisations, none of which matches the register's own. It is not translation: it converts characters and sounds rather than meaning, so 'Οδός' becomes 'Odos' rather than 'Street'. The difficulty is that transliteration is many-to-many. There are several competing standards per script — ISO, BGN/PCGN, national systems — and real data uses all of them plus improvisation. A robust pipeline therefore generates several romanisations of a source name rather than picking one, indexes all of them for retrieval, and treats an agreement in any of them as weaker evidence than an agreement in the original script. Two related operations often get conflated with it. Unicode normalisation, which makes the same visible character compare equal regardless of how it was composed, is a prerequisite and not optional. Confusable folding, which maps a Cyrillic 'а' onto a Latin 'a', prevents a homoglyph from silently splitting an entity — and is also the mechanism a bad actor would use to hide one. Entity Bind performs transliteration in the normalisation stage. Its measured name-tier accuracy has been recorded on Latin-script registers only, and the region parity work explicitly does not carry the live-adjudicated name tiers across jurisdictions. ## Where this shows up in Entity Bind Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price. - [Register coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form. - [How it works](https://entitybind.com/how-it-works): The seven-stage cascade in order, what each stage can settle on its own, and what it hands to the next. - [The accuracy method](https://entitybind.com/accuracy): Every published rate with the population it was measured over, its interval and its fixture — including the input shapes that fail. The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide. [Start free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [Normalisation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/normalisation): Normalisation rewrites a record into a comparable form — case, punctuation, legal forms, identifier shapes — before any comparison is attempted, and it is where most of the achievable accuracy in entity resolution is won or lost. - [Fuzzy matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fuzzy-matching): Fuzzy matching compares strings by similarity rather than equality, returning a score between zero and one — a useful retrieval signal and, on its own, not a calibrated basis for a merge. - [Blocking](https://entitybind.com/glossary/blocking): Blocking is the technique that makes entity resolution affordable by comparing each record only against a small set of plausible candidates instead of against every other record. - [Edit distance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/edit-distance): Edit distance counts the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions or substitutions needed to turn one string into another; Levenshtein distance is the standard form. ## The other 12 terms on this shelf How two records are compared and how the comparison is made cheap enough to run. Blocking, deterministic rules, probabilistic scoring, string distance. - [Normalisation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/normalisation) - [Blocking](https://entitybind.com/glossary/blocking) - [Candidate generation](https://entitybind.com/glossary/candidate-generation) - [Deterministic matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/deterministic-matching) - [Probabilistic matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/probabilistic-matching) - [Fellegi–Sunter](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fellegi-sunter) - [m-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/m-probability) - [u-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/u-probability) - [Match weight](https://entitybind.com/glossary/match-weight) - [Fuzzy matching](https://entitybind.com/glossary/fuzzy-matching) - [Edit distance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/edit-distance) - [Jaro–Winkler](https://entitybind.com/glossary/jaro-winkler) Previous, alphabetically: [Tool call](https://entitybind.com/glossary/tool-call) · Next, alphabetically: [u-probability](https://entitybind.com/glossary/u-probability) ## Evidence basis Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/transliteration, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.