Transliteration is the process of converting text written in one writing system to another. Unlike translation, it preserves phonetics rather than meaning while replacing characters.

Japanese romanization ("東京" → "Tokyo") is a classic example. Cyrillic to Latin conversion ("Москва" → "Moskva") and Arabic to Latin conversion are also forms of transliteration. Linguistics and writing systems books provide systematic coverage.

The ICU (International Components for Unicode) library provides transliteration rules for numerous writing system pairs. In programming, ICU's Transliterator class can be used to implement conversions.

From a character count perspective, transliteration can significantly change character count. A single kanji may become multiple Roman characters, requiring character count management before and after transliteration. Multilingual text processing books provide additional context.