Orthographic respelling.   I have divided the phenomena involved in respelling into four cases. The first is a simple transcription or orthographic respelling. This in turn includes four sub-cases. There is first the process of changing the alphabet, where an altered or entirely new symbol is assigned to each character in turn in a one-to-one relationship. With some alphabetic transcriptions this process simply removes the diacritics that belong to some of the characters of the written language. A third very popular orthographic respelling does not change the language, but changes lower case characters to their upper-case equivalents. Still another respelling of this category arises from the layout of the modern keyboard, called QWERTY. On occasion the clerk’s fingers may come to rest on the wrong keys, thus respelling the name in a systematic, but confusing way.

The distance function must be designed to make transcription as transparent as possible. In other words, no transcribed version should be measured to be very far from the original. It appears that all four of these operations is well enough defined to predict its transform reasonably well. It is probable that any errors made in the transcription process could be measured as a deviation using one of the traditional distance metrics such as the Levenstein metric or the Jaro string comparator.