Questions and Answers
This question could have multiple answers as all three terms
could be applicable. Translation, however, is not very
precise as it is the script and not the language that is
converted—the words are Malay whether they are represented
in Rumi or Jawi. Transliteration, the substitution of
letters, is better, but the purpose of conversion is to
represent the sounds of Malay and not the writing system, so
transcription is the most precise term. As an example,
the Jawi word ڤلاجر translates to English as student
and transcribes to Rumi as pelajar, but might be
transliterated as plajr as the Jawi does not encode any
vowel between the p and l sounds nor the
j and r sounds.
The converter essentially performs dictionary lookup: for
each word, we consult a mapping of Rumi and Jawi forms and, if
the word exists in the mapping, we return the form it maps to.
This method makes it quick to find good conversions and easy to
improve by correcting mistakes in or adding new words to the
dictionary, but has the drawback that it cannot convert any
words it does not already have in the dictionary. Please refer
to Technical Details for more
information.
The converter can only convert words it already has in its
dictionary. See How does the converter work?
above for more information.
All Rumi forms come from a
dictionary
which only contains the Rumi and Jawi forms and not information
such as part-of-speech or whether something is a name. If the
Jawi and Rumi are unambiguously a name and it is not capitalized
in Rumi, this is most likely an error that should be fixed.
We appreciate any offers to help. This converter and the
dictionary it uses are managed on GitHub. If you have a GitHub
account, you can directly report issues with the data (e.g., bad
or missing conversions) to the rumi-jawi
project, and issues with the site to the rumi-jawi-web
project. If you do not have a GitHub account, you may email
the maintainer at michaelgoodman@ntu.edu.sg.