Gemination Errors in Arabic-English Transliteration of Personal Names on Facebook

Abstract

This study aimed to explore how Arabic native speakers transliterate personal names containing geminates to English on social media and what transliteration anomalies they produce. A sample of 406 English transliterations of Arabic personal names with geminates by Arabic native speakers was compiled from Facebook and analyzed to find out the percentage of Arabic names in which geminates were transliterated into double consonants correctly; the percentage of Arabic names in which geminated consonants were reduced to a singleton consonant in the English transliteration; and the percentage of Arabic names where a singleton consonant was doubled in the English transliteration.  It was found that one third of the Arabic name tokens with geminates were transliterated correctly, i.e., the geminated consonant in Arabic was represented by a double consonant in the corresponding English transliteration as in compound names (Abdullah, Noureddin) and Nassar, Algammal, Alqattan, Allam, Hagga and son. In 41% of the name tokens, the geminate was represented by a single consonant in the corresponding English transliteration as in Amouna, Amool, Elzahar, Hamam, Elnagar, Sedeek, Fatouh. In 26% of the English transliterations, a single consonant was doubled in the corresponding transliteration, although the Arabic name has no geminates and the consonant is pronounced as a single phoneme as in Ahmmed, Anass, Ossama, Quassem, Sammar, Wissam, Yassin, Youniss. The most commonly geminated consonant was the s which comprised 23% of the tokens. Since Arabic geminates are spelled with a single consonant and a diacritical mark ّ that is not usually shown in the written form used by Arab adults, Arabic speakers tended to transfer the spelling of Arabic geminates into a single consonant in English. They also overgeneralized double consonants in the English transliteration of Arabic names that are pronounced with a single consonant phoneme. Recommendations for improving the transliteration competence of personal names by Arabic native speakers on social media are given.