transliteration

     If you are reading this now, you are familiar with the alphabet I am using to type it. It is still called the Phoenician alphabet in textbooks. There are other alphabets--Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic (used in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe) , Sanskrit, Arabic, and more. An alphabet uses characters that stand for sounds--it is phonetic--based on sounds, or "phonics". Each of the different alphabets stands for the set of sounds making up the languages using that alphabet. Different languages may have sounds that are not used in other languages. The sounds are part of what a person learning to speak a foreign language has to practice. You may have noticed that the "th" sound is a difficult one for foreign speakers of English. It is uncommon, and to some foreigners it sounds rude--like hissing at someone, or giving the raspberry or "Bronx cheer".
     Learning to read or write a foreign language is difficult and time-consuming. Learning to read or write a language that uses a different alphabet is even more difficult. A student needs to begin with ABC--literally. To translate these languages, speaking, is like translating any other language--the translator needs to speak both languages well. When the translation is written down, it is done using the characters in our alphabet. This is called a transliteration. Someone takes the sounds of the foreign language, and renders them into a usable form using our own alphabet and its sounds. This is why you may have noticed different spellings for Russian names, for example. A new, and presumably better, style of transliteration meant a new way to spell Russian words in English--one that would be closer to correct when an English-speaking person tried to pronounce the Russian words.
     We have to do something like this to translate Chinese and other Oriental languages. The Chinese system of writing does not use an alphabet at all. The characters stand for ideas, concepts, and things, not for sounds. This makes translation even more difficult. A system of rendering the Chinese sounds in English characters is called "pinyin". Pinyin may also make it possible for Chinese-speakers to use a computer keyboard, which would be difficult using the Chinese written language--it has thousands of different characters. This is how "Peking" became "Beijing"--it helps us to name the city so that a Chinese person would understand what we are saying. The older form isn't "wrong", and it doesn't need to be corrected in old works in print--but it helps to be aware of the changes, and why they were made.