Imagine that someone takes a word in another writing system (say, the Greek word 'αγαπη') and transliterates it into the Roman alphabet (in this case, 'agapē'). Then I take that romanization and try to convert it back into its original form in the original writing system. What am I doing? I'm not transliterating 'agapē' – I'm trying to recover the original, un-transliterated version.
Example:
I'm writing a program to _ transliterated Greek words so I can easily search a Greek dictionary for them.
I am in fact writing a program that does this to transliterated Greek and am looking for some good phrasing for how to describe it. Google searches have only yielded descriptions of the difference between 'transliteration' and 'transcription', neither of which is what is happening here…
Best Answer
http://intranet.library.arizona.edu/users/brewerm/sil/lib/transcription.html
Definitions: Transliteration - The spelling of the words of one language with characters from the alphabet of another. Ideally, this is a character for character replacement so that reverse transliteration into the original script is possible.