Romanization of Russian

There exist many possible systems for transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet of the Russian language to English or the Latin alphabet. Such transliteration is necessary for writing Russian names and other words in English text. It is also essential for the input of Russian text into computer by users who either do not have the keyboard or word processor set up for input of Cyrillic, or else they are not capable of typing rapidly on the distinct Cyrillic keyboard. In the latter case, they would type using a system of transliteration on the QWERTY keyboard and then use an automated tool to convert the text into Cyrillic.

Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems

Note that some phonetic transcription systems are intended for readers of languages other than English, for instance: Russian "Воронин" = English "Voronin" = French "Voronine" = German "Woronin".

ALA-LC

America Library Association & Library of Congress (ALA-LC) Romanization tables for Slavic alphabets (1997) are used in North American libraries.

BGN/PCGN

The BGN/PCGN system was developed by the United States Board on Geographic Names and by the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use. BGN adopted the system in 1944, and PCGN—in 1947.

GOST 16876-71

GOST 16876-71 (1983) (Russian: <onlyinclude>ГОСТ</onlyinclude>, an abbreviation of <onlyinclude>ГОсуда́рственный СТанда́рт</onlyinclude>, GOsudarstvenny STandart) is a transliteration system devised by the Main Administration of Geodesy and Cartography of the former Soviet Union.

ISO 9

ISO 9 (1995) is a transliteration standard from the International Organization for Standardization.

United Nations romanization system

The United Nations-recommended romanization system (1987) was based on GOST (see above). It is used in the Russian Federation and increasingly in international cartographic products.

Conventional transcription of Russian names

The following table describes a method to derive the most common informal transcriptions of Russian names into the Latin alphabet, suitable for English-speakers. It is similar to BGN/PCGN transliteration, with several exceptions.

Notes

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|else=soft}}  Unicode practices. Unicode supplies special characters that, among other things, are intended to be used for this kind of transliteration of soft and hard signs—namely: U+02B9 MODIFIER LETTER PRIME (ʹ) and  U+02BA MODIFIER LETTER DOUBLE PRIME (ʺ), repspectively. (Reference: Draft Unicode 4.1 names list, retrieved 2005, December 14.) The motivation in the design of Unicode behind supplying specialized “apostrophe-like characters” is that U+0027 [the simple “typewriter tick mark”: ' ] is a particularly overloaded character… and is even used for the representation of things from different categories: In ASCII it is used to represent a punctuation mark… or a modifier letter. … (Punctuation marks generally break words; modifier letters generally are considered part of a word.) (Encoding Characters with Multiple Semantic Values, Chapter 6 Writing Systems and Punctuation (pdf) of Unicode 4.0.)

Note that unlike the mentioned alternatives (U+02B9, U+0027), using specialized punctuation marks like ’ U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (and ” U+201D RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK) for the purpose of transliterating Cyrillic soft (and hard) signs is semantically incorrect (they break words, whereas the Cyrillic letters are parts of words); one of the consequences of such practice may be an incorrect treatment of the words by software. Despite this, such practices exist.

See also

• Cyrillic alphabet
• Early Cyrillic alphabet
• Romanization of Ukrainian
• Volapuk encoding
• Faux Cyrillic
• Kyrillisches Alphabet (from the German Wikipedia) shows how to transliterate between Russian and German.

References

• U.S. Board on Geographic Names Foreign Names Committee Staff, 1994. Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions, pp. 84-85.

External links

• Summary of romanization systems for Russian (Adobe PDF) by Thomas T. Pederson.
• United Nations-recommended romanization system for Russian (Adobe PDF)
• American Library Association & Library of Congress Romanization
• Russian transliterated (phonetic) keyboard layout
• Russian toponym translations and transliterations database
• Transliteration of Russian into various European languagesbg:Шльокавица

ru:Транслит