Transliteration
Also: Romanisation · Romanization
Writing a text's sounds in another script rather than its meaning. Not translation — a reader learns how a word sounds, not what it means.
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Transliteration rewrites a text in a different script while preserving how it sounds. বাংলা becomes bāṅlā. It is not a translation: a reader who does not know Bengali learns nothing about what the word means, only how to say it.
That sounds like a small thing and is not. A researcher who cannot read Devanagari but knows the vocabulary of their field can work with a transliterated text — recognising names, spotting a technical term, checking whether a passage says what a translation claims. It is the bridge between a script you cannot read and a language you partly can.
The catch is that there is no single correct transliteration. Several schemes exist for every major script and they disagree, which is why a transliteration is only usable in scholarship when the scheme is named alongside it.