The most difficult problem faced by writers of reports containing Arabic names is determining the correct translation of those names into English. Transliteration Assistant is a productivity enhancer for Microsoft Word, Excel, and Access which (a) eliminates this problem when writing reports, and (b) automatically translates long lists of names from Arabic into English. Transliteration Assistant ensures that any names appearing in finished products conform to the Congressionally mandated “Intelligence Community Standard for the Transliteration of Arabic Names” (the “IC Standard”). Transliteration Assistant also supports other widely-used U.S. government standards, including the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (“BGN”), the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (“FBIS”), the Middle East Languages Transliteration Standard (“MELTS”), and the Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System (“SATTS”).
When used interactively, the report writer types an approximate spelling of the desired name. For example, here are three approximate spellings of the same Arabic name:
The writer then quickly selects the correct Arabic spelling:
جبران خليل جبران بن ميخائيل بن سعدFinally, the correct IC standard transliteration is automatically generated and inserted into the document:
Jubran Khalil Jubran Bin-Mikha’il Bin-Sa’dThe Arabic spelling may also be preserved in a footnote, annotation, or attachment.
Transliteration Assistant may also be used to process large lists of names, such as might appear in a telephone book, in a fully‑automatic, “best guess” manner. The expected accuracy of names translated this way can be as high as 97%, much higher than for other commercially-available machine translation systems.
The list of names may be opened in or copied to Microsoft Word, Excel, or Access. The analyst then selects those names to be translated and selects the appropriate target transliteration system (BGN, FBIS, IC, MELTS, or SATTS).
| نجيب محفوظ | Najib Mahfuz |
| محمود درويش | Mahmud Darweesh |
| مي زيادة | Mayy Ziyadah |
| نزار توفيق قباني | Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani |
| أحمد شوقي | Ahmad Shawqi |
| طه حسين | Taha Husayn |
| خليل مطران | Khalil Mutran |
| غازي بن عبد الرحمن القصيبي | Ghazi Bin-’Abd-al-Rahman al-Qusaybi |
Transliteration Assistant may be used with names of places as well as names of persons. When a place name is entered, a list of matches (both in Arabic and in BGN transliteration) and their coordinates is presented.
Place names may be annotated in reports with either latitude/longitude coordinates or the Military Grid Reference System (MGRS).
Transliteration Assistant may be used concurrently with Geoscope Map Viewer, Basis Technology’s map viewing application, to display selected locations on a map.
Transliteration Assistant includes a powerful facility for centralized access to online reference materials, including dictionaries, word lists, gazetteers, and the CIA’s Chiefs of State database. Words, people, and places may be looked up by typing them in either English or Arabic, and results may be quickly pasted back into the document being edited.
Transliteration Assistant offers features and capabilities designed specifically to support document and media exploitation (DOMEX) and cell phone exploitation (CELLEX) missions.
Document exploitation (DOCEX) linguists achieve productivity gains of better than 2x and accuracy gains of better than 4x in identifying and resolving names appearing in target documents. Transliteration Assistant may be used in conjunction with optical character recognition (OCR) software to remediate output from such software.
Media exploitation (MEDEX) linguists utilize the automatic translation capabilities to rapidly process large name databases such as telephone directories, personnel rosters, and contact lists, with productivity gains of better than 10x and accuracy gains of better than 8x. Transliteration Assistant integrates easily with such widely-used forensic analysis tools as The Sleuth Kit and Autopsy.
Cell phone exploitation (CELLEX) linguists utilize the “name cleaning” capabilities to rapidly translate and normalize contact lists. Transliteration Assistant integrates easily with commercial cell phone exploitation tools such as MOBILedit! Forensic and the CelleBrite Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED).