Abstract: A method and system for identifying variants of one or more terms to be searched in a data collection, and searching such data collection to retrieve the terms and their variants, to ensure that all variants of the search term existing in the data collection are identified. A term that has been transliterated from a foreign language is separated into one or more letter sequences, at least some of which have associated therewith one or more variant letter sequences. A family of variants for the original term is constructed, and the original search term is compared against the newly constructed variants to reveal the presence or absence of a transliteration variant of the original search term in a data set.