The following principles guided the development of the Bikdash Arabic Transliteration Rules (BATR) shown in the table above:
Principle 1. The capital and small symbols of the same English letter represent in general different sounds or different Arabic letters. In general, Capital letters are emphatic versions of small letters whether vowels or consonants.
Principle 2. The Arabic script should be deducible from the English transliteration unambiguously and without necessarily understanding the meaning of the Arabic text. The reverse should also be possible when the Arabic script is fully "voweled" (i.e. muxakkal with kasrah, fatHat', Dammat', xaddat', and tanwiin.). BATR must be high-quality to allow writing the qureaan or Arabic poetry exactly.
Principle 3. BATR is highly phonetic. In other words, a person with no knowledge of Arabic should be able to read and pronounce the Arabic text with "reasonable" accuracy. When the principles of BATR are explained to this person, he or she should be able to approximate the sound of the Arabic text with high accuracy.
Principle 4. As much as possible, every symbol represents consistently one consonant regardless of its location in the word or in the sentence. There are only two exceptions: z' and t'.
Principle 5. Long vowels of Classical Arabic are represented by doubled symbols: ii, aa, and uu, and i, a, and u represent short versions (kasrah, fatHat', Dammat'). In general, combinations of vowels are allowed to express different vowels or intonations including colloquial and nonstandard vowels. For instance, ai represents the colloquial vowel in fain? (meaning “where?”).
Principle 6. Special characters like the hyphen (-) and the backslash are dedicated for breaks and other form of controls.
Principle 7. When a vernacular Arabic word can be said, pronounced, or written in several forms, one of which agrees with Classical Arabic, then this latter form is adopted.