ANSI 239 Romanization Standards and "Reversibility": A Dialog to Arrive at a Policy

Abstract

The June 1977 issue of the Bulletin Of the American Society for Information Science (p. 35) carried a short position statement prepared by Ben Ami Lipetz, Chairman of the ASIS Standards Committee, on the subject of “Standards for Romanization of Languages That Use Non-Roman Alphabets.” That statement is reproduced below with the permission of the Bulletin. The statement recommends that ANSI 239 reexamine the basic premises behind its romanization work, and that it establish “reversibility” as the guiding principle for all future work. Reversibility refers to the ability to transliterate both forward (from original to rendered version) and backward (from rendered version to original) without ambiguity or loss of information in either direction. The statement regards reversibility in transliteration as essential in an age of machine-readable bibliographic records.