The first Arabic language analyst for the project was a BYU undergraduate student named Derek Foxley, hired as part-time.
Buckwalter oversaw Foxley's Arabic tasks and made the final adjustments and refinements the transliteration table.
The Buckwalter Transliteration is an ASCII-only transliteration scheme, representing Arabic orthography strictly one-to-one, unlike the more common romanization schemes that add morphological information not expressed in Arabic script.
Similarly, sometimes Arabic sentences will borrow non-Arabic letters from Persian, some of which are defined in the full Buckwalter table.
Finally, another important decision to make is how much normalization of the Arabic text should be done during transliteration.
This mechanism allows for automatic language processing to take place leaving non-Arabic text as is, unprocessed when it sees the double quotes.
Originally, even < > & were not used either especially < > which are French borrowed quote marks because they are occasionally used in Arabic text.
Their XML safe versions keep with the mnemonic device devised (and discussed below) in that I O W correspond (if imprecisely) to each of the sounds made.
There were three key concepts used the transliteration schema: The first was that each Arabic letter (sound) can only correspond to one English-language character.
The strength of the Buckwalter transliteration is that every single Arabic letter is represented distinctly.
Yet, its reliance on traditional transliterations or mnemonic devices for anything non-traditional makes it very easy to learn.
waqado wuhibuwA EaqolFA waDamiyrFA waEalayohimo >ano yuEaAmila baEoDuhumo baEoDFA biruwHi {lo Wa-qad wuhibū ʿaqlan wa-ḍamīran wa-ʿalayhim ʾan yuʿāmila baʿḍuhum baʿḍan bi-rūḥi l-ʾiḫāʾi.