สำนักราชบัณฑิตยสภา

The Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand Romanization, Transliteration, and Transcription for the Globalization of the Thai Language 840 Vol. 31 No. 3 Jul.-Sep. 2006 Currently this is the most popular system since it is used in Karaoke singing. The average person is interested in imitating the closest sound, without regard to either rule or meaning. This form of Anglicization may be a unique case to Thailand only. 2.4.6 ISO 11940 In- formation and Documentation– Transliteration of Thai (1998) The update of the Royal Institute’s Romanization system was carried out simultaneously with the creation of the ISO 11940 Information and Documentation– Transliteration of Thai. The creation of this International Standards established a system for the transliteration of Thai characters into Roman cha- racters. One set of rules is provided for a completely reversible strin- gent conversion whereby absolute principles of transliteration are applied with no modification. This Romanized trans- literation system is a means of converting the Thai writing system into a Roman alphabet writing system. Since there are fewer Roman characters than Thai cha- racters, diacritical marks, punctu- ation marks, and a combination of two Roman characters, or a digraph, are needed to represent one Thai character. The aim of this system is to provide a means of international communication of written messages in a form which permits the automatic transmission or reconstitution of either written script by humans or machines. This system of conversion is intended to provide complete and unambiguous re- versibility. It is recognized that the transliterated form resulting from this system does not always provide the correct pronunciation of the original Thai text. However, the system serves as a means of finding the Thai graphisms automatically and thus to allow those with a knowledge of Thai to pronounce the Thai text cor- rectly. In this system 87 Thai characters, including numerical symbols and traditional symbols can be transliterated into the Roman alphabet and re-trans- literated back to Thai characters. For example ‡µ– “to kick” is transliterated as “eta” where “eta” gives the wrong pronunciation but it can be re-transliterated back to ‡µ– , either by humans or machines. These 87 Thai charac- ters may be easily accessed and employed through the Unicode system for ease of global com- munication in the future. 3. Conclusion An attempt to represent Thai words using Roman script has been endeavored since 1913. Almost a hundred years have passed in which six different systems were employed for different purposes, some with traditional practice, some with linguistic rules, some with me- chanical rules and some with no rules at all. Currently, only three systems play an important role in Thai society: King Rama VI system, The Royal Institute Romanization and Anglicization. It is left to the language educators and learners to choose the one most appropriate to their purpose. However, the system that may be used more extensively in the future on a global scale to exchange information is the ISO 11940 Information and Documentation – Transliteration of Thai which was developed from 1998 in tandem with the universally popular Uni- code computer encoding system. Bibliography Amondarunarak, Chamuen (Chaem Sundaravej). 2511 (1968). The Essential Royal Works of King Rama VI, The Birth of Family Name, book 1. ISO 11940 Information and Document- ation – Transliteration of Thai ISO/TC 46 N 1854 The Royal Institute, 1939. Notification of the Royal Institute Concerning the Transcription of Thai Charac- ters into Roman. The Royal Institute, 1982. Romanization Guide for Thai Script. The Royal Institute, 2543 (2000). The Proclamation of the Office of the Prime Minister, the Proclamation of the Royal Institute, and Roman- ization Rules.