THE NEED FOR STANDARDISING THE ROMANISATION OF ARABIC

This paper investigates the need for a standard method of representing the Arabic text in Roman script. The data for this paper is basically Arabic-English, but it is hoped that the discussion may also prove relevant to other European languages. It does not presume to answer all the relevant questions nor offer a systematic method for standardizing the Romanization of Arabic texts; it rather sets out to present the problems involved in this issue and to ask most of the relevant questions that need to be posed before seriously attempting a solution to the problems.