Recently, I received an e-mail from a translation agency's owner on the West Coast saying that though he appreciated my article in a previous ATA Chronicle issue, his agency only deals with Roman-script languages, and thus will not need any Indonesian translation services in the foreseeable future. Another project manager on the East Coast once called frantically about a Malay document in a non-Roman script. When I told her that modern Malay is written in the Roman script, she insisted otherwise and faxed the document to prove her point. To make a long story short, eventually, I found out that the document was in Malayalam instead of in Malay. Accordingly, Malayalam is written in the Malayalam script used in the state of Kerala in India.

In a separate case, another translation agency's proprietor casually told me that she was just forced to decline an 80,000 word translation project into Indonesian because "We don't have the desktop publishing capabilities to produce camera-ready text in non-Roman scripts." I assured her that Indonesian uses the Roman script and that I use standard wordprocessing software available at any Egghead store.

Long silence...

As the three illustrations show, Asian languages beyond Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese and Japanese have long been the source of confusion, bewilderment and headache. Many people simplistically associate Asian languages with those unusual non-Roman and worm-like scripts, despite the fact that some Asian languages do use the Roman script. Obviously, knowing the correct language spoken in a certain country is one thing; knowing the correct script to write that particular language is another thing.

Understandably, many people in the translation industry, much less John and Jane Doe, develop allergy-like reactions when dealing with most Asian languages, "exotic languages," or "languages of limited diffusion." Never mind the current boom in international trade involving Asian countries, never mind John Naisbitt's assessment in his Megatrends Asia that "the Asian continent, from India to Japan, from below the old Soviet Union down to Indonesia, now accounts for more than half of the world's population."

The following list is excerpted from Writing Systems of the World, an entertaining book by Akira Nakanishi (Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont & Tokyo, Japan, Fourth Printing, 1994). This illuminating book describes scripts used all over the world -- not just in Asia.

When using the list, please note that there are variations from country to country, from language to language, from script to script. The Roman script used for Turkish uses different diacritical marks than those used for Indonesian or Vietnamese. The Arabic script used for Sindhi uses more letters (twenty-four to be exact) than the standard Arabic. The Urdu script is actually the Nastaliq style of the Arabic script. The Russian script used for Kazakh uses extra letters, different from those used for Turkmen.

The list only contains modern Asian languages and their scripts currently in actual use. For example, while it is true that before the Spanish invasion of the Philippines, Tagalog was written in the Tagalog script, today it is written in the Roman script.