TEI and Transliteration

As a world literature fanatic, the first thing that came to mind when considering the breadth of challenging texts to chose from for the encoding challenge was aljamiado literature - that is literature of the Romance languages (most popularly Spanish and French) into Arabic script.

However, there are a couple of major challenges presented by this type of rare literature. Firstly, these texts appear only in manuscript form with extensive annotations and often grammatical errors. Secondly, digitized medieval Arabic manuscripts (not aljamiado) that currently exist are entirely unsearchable, which leads us to the final issue: the TEI-ms module is limited in its elements and attributes and cannot support accurate and detailed descriptions of manuscripts in Arabic.

Nonetheless, I was still draw to an aljamiado manuscript because in my chosen example, the Arabic text is transliterating Spanish. The transliteration is key because it would allow my group to make decisions on how to transcribe elements into Latin characters. On the TEI catalog it states that it uses @xml:lang attribute to identify the language of the text. Furthermore, the @xml:lang tag can contain a subtag that defines the script ("Ara-Spa") - or Arabic to Spanish.

By incorporating extensive transliteration tags, the form and content of the original manuscript are identified. Since transliteration is not an entirely formed concept in TEI, this endeavor would be highly time consuming and complicated - working around different attributes and creating new ones. It would requiring intense knowledge of Spanish and Arabic (or extensive use of dictionaries) which is why we opted not to go with this option as a group. 

-Madiha Zahra