Thread:MarshallsiAnjingBomba/@comment-33037880-20160120203028/@comment-26491957-20160120223822

For Arabic, Hebrew, and Thai, I uses manual transcription technique by reading when romanizing because if I take full direct transliteration, it's unreadable to non-learners.

In romanizing Arabic, I use the system most closely matching up to ISO 233 so that I could maintain consonant matches. As for the vowels, it totally depends on the actual meaning the word brings. For example, لعبة would be lʿbẗ because vowels are rarely marked in Arabic but with vowels it would be either لَعْبَة laʿbaẗ ("game") or لُعْبَة luʿbaẗ ("toy"), not to mention how many pronunciation would be possible without vowel markers, e.g. كلب kalb.

For Hebrew, which is also commonly written without vowel markers, dependence on the actual pronunciation is also important, mostly depending on dictionaries.

In Thai, unless you can understand how ISO 11940 works, you won't even think it should be on Thai road signs. For this case, I use Royal Thai General System of Transcription which would transcribe มหัศจรรย์ as mahatsachan, close to how it's pronounced, while ISO 11940 displays mh̄ạṣ̄crry̒ and the simpler ISO 11940-2 would put it as mahatsacan.