Thursday, April 21, 2011
Muammar al-Gaddafi...hard to decipher (AP Photo: Ricardo De Luca)
The Arabic language has no transliteration standards, few vowels and myriad pronunciations for names, adding up to a real nightmare for banks trying to comply with government sanctions against Middle Eastern dictators.
Economic sanctions come with watch lists, but the lists are often limited in their variations of names. For instance, the U.S. Treasury Department offers 12 possible spellings for the leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi. But there are more than 100 variations for his family name alone, experts say.
CJK Dictionary Institute says it can help banks locate targets of sanctions. Having studied phone directories, encyclopedias, student rosters and general-interest books, the institute created a dictionary that it claims has seven million variants of Arab proper names.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Arabic Names Spell Trouble for Banks (by Deborah Ball and Cassell Bryan-Low, Wall Street Journal)
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