Feb. 5th, 2009 01:06 pm
"Do what you can"
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muckefuckWell, it was bound to happen sooner or later: I finally had to create a record written in a language for which there is no established ALA-LC Romanisation standard. I asked one of my co-workers what to do and he told me, "I had this problem a few years ago, so I wrote to LC and asked and they said, 'Do what you can.'" So I did what I could--but before I go further, I wonder, does anyone else want to have a crack? Here's the title as it appears on the cover:
There is an ALA-LC Romanisation standard for Kazakh, but it's based on the Cyrillic script officially used in Kazakhstan. To use it, I'd have to transcribe the Arabic to Cyrillic using this table of correspondences and then use the ALA-LC table to reduce this to Latin script, which seemed a lot more cumbersome than going from Arabic to Latin. The Latin orthography in the chart is officially promulgated by the Kazakh government; there is a proposal to replace the Cyrillic script with it, but this seems to be stalled. The relationship between this orthography and that of modern Anatolian Turkish should be obvious.
The title is translated into Chinese as 小骆驼 or "Little Camel". I can't verify this, because the only Kazakh dictionary I've managed to find is Kazakh-Russian, and it seems there are some real differences between the literary languages of the two communities. The closest entry to بوقاتان is боқат boqat which translates to "slag, waste, dross".
بوقاتانI know that's not much to go on, but the spelling of the place of publication is so exotic, I don't even have the proper Arabic character set to handle it. So ignore the second hamza in this attempt:
ءۇرئمجىAny guesses? It's Kazakh in Arabic script. The place of publication is (using the revised Latin script proposed by the government of Kazakhstan) "Ürımji". Or, as it's usually written in English, Urumchi.
There is an ALA-LC Romanisation standard for Kazakh, but it's based on the Cyrillic script officially used in Kazakhstan. To use it, I'd have to transcribe the Arabic to Cyrillic using this table of correspondences and then use the ALA-LC table to reduce this to Latin script, which seemed a lot more cumbersome than going from Arabic to Latin. The Latin orthography in the chart is officially promulgated by the Kazakh government; there is a proposal to replace the Cyrillic script with it, but this seems to be stalled. The relationship between this orthography and that of modern Anatolian Turkish should be obvious.
The title is translated into Chinese as 小骆驼 or "Little Camel". I can't verify this, because the only Kazakh dictionary I've managed to find is Kazakh-Russian, and it seems there are some real differences between the literary languages of the two communities. The closest entry to بوقاتان is боқат boqat which translates to "slag, waste, dross".