Abstract
Approach and software for Romanization (i.e. transliteration into a Latin-based alphabet) of Urdu text. My goal is to reflect the original pronunciation as well as possible, while not violating the requirement that the original spelling be restorable.
To help the reader with the pronunciation, I want to insert missing short vowels and disambiguate a few other cases. I provide a Perl script that implements the deterministic part of the transliteration and marks positions where human decision is needed.
Urdu uses a few characters that are not used in the original Arabic script. Moreover, some of the original Arabic letters might prefer a different Latin representation if the mapping were motivated by Arabic, instead of Urdu pronunciation.
On the target side, no particular language was on my mind when modeling the pronunciation. See below for details.