Читать книгу A Rich Brew - Shachar M. Pinsker - Страница 7

A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

Modern Jewish culture is multilingual, and the sources I draw on, cite, and analyze in this book are in Hebrew, Yiddish, German, English, Russian, and Polish. Three of these languages do not use Roman characters, and this fact creates a major problem, since there are various norms and variations. Creating a perfectly consistent system of transliteration in English across the various languages is doomed to fail, despite the best intentions. The purpose of transliteration is to assist readers of English who are not familiar with the original languages, and this principle takes precedence over the desire for consistency. Nevertheless, I try to be consistent within each language. For Hebrew, I follow the Prooftexts journal system of Romanization, which is a modified, simplified version of the Library of Congress system. For Yiddish, I follow the YIVO system. For Russian, I follow the Library of Congress system. For proper names of people and places, I try to retain the form most familiar to readers of English.

When texts from foreign languages have been translated into English, I use and cite these published translations. Otherwise, translations are mine, with much-needed assistance from experts on languages in which I am not proficient.