# Russian: Transliteration in other languages



## cyanista

Split from here


			
				Brian P said:
			
		

> Ciao caro Alberto,
> 
> Dovrebbe essere tri raza In russo si scrive  Три раза целую и обнимаю крепко


Allow me to disagree with your correction. The sentence was meant for an Italian speaker and transliterated correspondingly. An Italian would read "rasa" as [raza] which is the correct pronunciation. "raza" would be read as [ratsa] and this is not how it should be pronounced.

Do you see my point?


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## WERWOLF

cyanista said:
			
		

> . An Italian would read "rasa" as [raza] which is the correct pronunciation. "raza" would be read as [ratsa] and this is not how it should be pronounced.
> 
> Do you see my point?


I see, but I mean you are wrong, the phonetic transcription should be international, not national (Italian, German, Spanish). So it should be transcripted as: [ra:za] independent from the speakers origin.


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## cyanista

Should it? That would mean everyone woud have to learn this unified transliteration. I know that there is at least one international method of transliteration but it hasn't won wide recognition yet - for the reason mentioned above.

As of now, most languages use their own transliteration based on the specific rules of pronunciation and spelling. 

Чехов - Tschechow (German), Chekhov (English)

Ельцин - Jelzin (German), Yeltsin (English)

And so on.


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## WERWOLF

cyanista said:
			
		

> Should it? That would mean everyone woud have to learn this unified transliteration.


Yes, everybody who wants correctly transliterate phonetic.


			
				cyanista said:
			
		

> I know that there is at least one international method of transliteration but it hasn't won wide recognition yet - for the reason mentioned above.



Is not true.
There is only one *international* und *universal*l method of transliteration and it *has* won: IPA

The others are nighter international nor universal.


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## papillon

WERWOLF said:
			
		

> Is not true.
> There is only one *international* und *universal*l method of transliteration and it *has* won: IPA


Shall we move this to a separate thread (perhaps in the General section)?


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## WERWOLF

I don't know. I mean, there is no reason. But, do as you wish.


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## Brian P

Mamma mia, Alberto! Look what you've started. You asked for the meaning of a phrase and now you have all these people at each others' throats arguing about Russian transliteration.

I hope that after all this you got your three kisses and a hug!

Greetings from Narodnaya Respublika Raya (this is what my Russian friend, Dmitri, calls Southern California. It means "Peoples' Republic Of Paradise")


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## Jana337

WERWOLF said:
			
		

> Yes, everybody who wants correctly transliterate phonetic.


This is too much to ask in a friendly letter (I assume that Alberto wanted us to translate a sentence from an e-mail). I'd be rather upset if Czech newspapers deviated from Čechov.

Jana


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## Alberto77

Ciao Brian, you are right... i really started a huge deal! ;-) But I'm proud it is a matter of big interest at least. Anyway I didn't do it pointless, I'm gonna get kisses and hugs very shortly..... ;-)
ciao
alb

p.s. as it was maybe quite easily understood, it is from an e-mail, eh eh, Jana is right (as always... you are a might! ;-) )


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## Outsider

WERWOLF said:
			
		

> There is only one *international* und *universal*l method of transliteration and it *has* won: IPA


No one uses IPA to transcribe Russian in newspapers or subtitles. And understandably so: most people cannot read IPA. Plus they would have to learn new sounds that don't exist in their native languages.

And here's another thought: nowadays, perhaps the most common transcription of Russian into the Latin alphabet is based on English spelling. The letter "je" is usually transcribed as "zh", since English does not have this sound. However, in Portuguese we do have it. So why shouldn't we write Jirinovsky instead of Zhirinovsky, for example?


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## Anatoli

There is a need for a standard romanisation method for Russian, isn't there?
There are a lot of legal issues because of that causing pain to people involved. I personally had to go through some of these.

Rules change. Russian passports used to have the French way of spelling Russian names, so Checherin (Чечерин) would be Tchetcherine, Zhukov (Жуков) - Joukov, etc. Now, they use English rules. But same Checherin will go to Italy to become Кекерин, to France to become - Шешерэн, to Germany to become Хехерин? Nobody knows how to pronounce Russian names when they are transcribed because there are no rules. Chinese and Japanese don't use Roman letters are either but pinyin (Mandarin) and romaji (Japanese) are standard methods now.

Ярославль - Yaroslavl, Jaroslawl
Челябинск - Chelyabinsk, Tscheljabinsk, Tcheliabinsk, Czeliabinsk, Čeljabinsk, etc


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## papillon

Anatoli said:
			
		

> Russian passports used to have the French way of spelling Russian names, so Checherin (Чечерин) would be Tchetcherine, Zhukov (Жуков) - Joukov, etc. Now, they use English rules. But same Checherin will go to Italy to become Кекерин, to France to become - Шешерэн, to Germany to become Хехерин Nobody knows how to pronounce Russian names when they are transcribed because there are no rules.



So I guess that leaves us with two questions: 
1. Is there/should there be a unique way to transliterate names from cyrillic to latin alphabet?

  I think, for official purposes -- yes. And there is. In Russia, English transliteration has become standard.

2. What is Mr Checherin to do as he moves from country to country? Since the prospect of teaching every person in Italy, France and Germany the rules of pronouncing Russian names seems inlikely, Mr Checherin will just have to be patient in explaining how his name is pronounced, over and over again.  An Italian would have the same problem in France and Germany. In the US, the question on how to pronounce one's name has become almost standard.

However, within the confines of this Forum, I think it is reasonable to give a transliteration based on the rules of a particular language. In speaking with an American, I can give the name of my hometown Харьков as Har'kov or Khar'kov but as Jarkov for a Spanish speaker.
_Edit_: I would say Mr Checherin wouldn't do too badly, seeing that at least those languages HAVE the sounds to approximate his name. On the other hand, someone named Lipov in Japan may have to get used to his Japanese name of Ripov (in pronoviation, not spelling).


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## Anatoli

Спасибо, земляк, я тоже родом из Харькова 

I would prefer still to have a standard way, like you have the rule to pronounce Chinese 'q' as 'ch' ', although it's different from other languages but it's an ISO standard, accepted in most languages using Roman letters.

If we had a standard, then most people would know how to pronounce Russian names. Teaching foreigners how to pronounce is not a problem. The main problem is not with pronunciation but with variants in spelling. If you want to match  Chelyabinsk with whatever other source, you need to use all possible combinations to make sure you cover everything. If a person has his documents translated followed non-standard way but his name was spelled differently in other documents, then you need to prove somehow that you speak about the same person. My relatives had this problem, which required involvement an authorised translator to prove that 'ou' and 'u', and 'ch' and 'sh' are just different ways to transliterate 2 Cyrillic letters.


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

Unfortunately, now that English has become so much the international standard over the last forty years, other systems of transliteration are falling into disuse - victims of globalization. As little as thirty years ago Russians were extremely sensitive to the differences in transliteration for each language, and edited their work accordingly.

It reminds me of a story my aunt who came from Russia to Argentina told me. There was (probably still is) a Russian language newspaper in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately, the name of one Argentine province sounds all too uncomfortably like a major Russian obscenity, so whenever the name came up in print, the newspaper always transliterated the name into Russian using an English transliteration system!


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## papillon

Thomas,
I 'm intrigued! Which province are you talking about?
---you can give it in the English transliteration:<


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

Papillon:

Jujuy.

The newspaper wrote it as жужуй.

Tom


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## Anatoli

The Chinese province Anhui is transliterated as Аньхой and when 'hui' is in a family name they are transcribed as 'хуэй'.


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## Thomas F. O'Gara

Anatoli:

And then of course there's the old joke about the Chinese philosopher....


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## Ptak

Etcetera said:


> "Ya" is the common transliteration of я.


Aha, because "я" sounds exactly like "ya".
But "меня" doesn't sound "men*y*a" at all  

I hate this wierd transliteration: Izvinitye, Olya, Tanya etc  
And after that we wonder at the awful pronouciation of Americans...


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## Crescent

Ptak said:


> Aha, because "я" sounds exactly like "ya".
> But "меня" doesn't sound "men*y*a" at all
> 
> I hate this wierd transliteration: Izvinitye, Olya, Tanya etc
> And after that we wonder at the awful pronouciation of Americans...



Ptak, I do agree with you in the sense that the pronounciation of Russian by foreginers is generally fairly bad, but let's take into consideration the fact that our language is very, very different from English or Romance languages all together. It is precisely all these different sounds which make it so hard for foreigners to learn it. Yes, all the ''y'' and ''i'' and 'j'' 's looke pretty awful in transliterations, but how do you propose we should transliterate such sounds as ''я'', ''ю'', ''е'' etc. ? Without them, the words would sound even more strange: Ola, Kata, Izvinite, Tana...

Zelenyj - personally, I prefer either ''menia'' or ''menya'' but to me, ''menja'' looks very strange. I always think that it should be pronounced ''меньжа'' when written like that. (and it shouldn't!!)


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## Ptak

Crescent said:


> Without them, the words would sound even more strange: Ola, Kata, Izvinite, Tana...


Izvinite is ok (it's much better then Izvinit*ye*, don't you think so?)

And I prefer that one call me Ola, ok,.. BUT NOT OL*Y*A PLEASE!!


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## Crescent

Ptak said:


> And I prefer that one call me Ola, ok,.. BUT NOT OL*Y*A PLEASE!!



Ptak, I can't even imagine how an English speaker would pronounce ''Izvinite'' (without the y), without ''tripping over'' the word several times, trying to make up their mind whether the 'e' at the end should be pronounced or not. 

And as for 'Ola', well, if the person addressing you was Spanish, there would be calling you a ''wave''. Ola = волна in Spanish.  So it would be like: Эй, Волна! Иди сюда.. 
Does that change your opinion on ''Olya''?


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## Nanon

Crescent, I couldn't agree more, transliteration is ugly indeed. But for those who don't read Cyrillic it is (alas - from my point of view) necessary...
Besides, the use of "ja" for "я", etc., does not work well in English, but it does in German, for instance (ahem... I don't speak German).

If you want to see horrible (this is for you, Crescent) and numerous systems of Romanisation, you may have a look at this page in Wikipedia. You will see that many variants can be used, but none of them helps students to pronounce well.

*ty menja ne išči*
or
*ty menya ne ishchi* (very common but not quite logical, though: y is used for both я and ы...)
or
*ty menâ ne iŝi* (I don't like this one very much either, though it is logical)
etc...!

The second one is commonly used by English speakers, besides, it uses no diacritics.


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## Ptak

Crescent said:


> Does that change your opinion on ''Olya''?


Seriously, no


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## beclija

I much prefer the transliteration with "j". Another option is the one with the apostrophe. "menya" looks ugly to me. One problem is that if you use "y" to transliterate й, я, etc., what will you use to render ы? Another reason is that the original sound of "j" is precisely that - "j", which didn't exist in Latin, was invented as a consonantal version of "i", so it is very much analogous to й from и. Most languages still preserve that meaning - Italian, German, Hungarian, Dutch, the Scandinavian languages and those Slavic languages that are written in Latin letters, and even the International Phonetic Alphabet. The fact that it means "x", "ž" or "dž" respectively in Spanish, French and English makes them rather exotic. 

It is common usage in most Western languages to transcribe non-Latin names such that they can be read most naturally with the closest equivalent sounds of the target language. So Горбачев becomes "Gorbatschow" in German,  "Gorbatchov" in French, and "Gorbachev" in Englisch and the linguist Трубецкой would be "Trubetzkoj", "Troubetskoy"  and "Trubetzkoy" respectively. 
This kind of approximate _transcription _makes sense for items such as names, which are widely used by people with no knowledge of the language. But I don't see how it would make sense for learners of the language - here a more precise _transliteration _seems more in place, and why not use the standard scientific transliteration which is largely based on the Czech and Croatian latin alphabets.


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## xrayspex

_here a more precise transliteration seems more in place, and why not use the standard __scientific transliteration__ which is largely based on the Czech and Croatian latin alphabets_ 


Good idea, when you're transliterating into Czech or Croatian. 

It's also a good idea, perhaps, to use "ja" for Я if you're transliterating into French or German. 

When you're transliterating into English, it doesn't make much sense to criticize the common English pronunciation of roman letters, i.e. "ja" as жа.


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## beclija

I'm not proposing to use the scientific transliteration when transcribing names and similar items which will be encountered by people with no knowledge whatsoever of the source language; this would only lead to mispronounciations, so the national transcription practices as illustrated above are very valuable for those limited purposes. 

But when transcribing entire phrases, the only people with a reasonable chance of encountering it are learners of the language or linguists, and those groups I expect to bother enough to be able to cope with something that does not reflect the pronounciation in their native language directly. They get some reward for it as well (especially learners): The scientific transliteration is simply more precise. If you transcribe ы, й andя equally as "y", that can cause an awful lot of confusion. Also, transcribing ш as "sh" might not always work - I don't know for Russian, but in Serbian there are quite a few words with -sh- pronounced seperately.

I am not criticizing the English pronounciation of "j" (nor anyone else's), just pointing out that it is not really typical.


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## xrayspex

_the only people with a reasonable chance of encountering it are learners of the language or linguists, and those groups I expect to bother enough to be able to cope with something that does not reflect the pronounciation in their native language directly. _

I think I fall into this category, although I am so new that I'm not really sure that I'm learning much yet... and it's not so much that I don't want to bother with which may be the correct or most common transliterations, it's just confusing, especially when there isn't any reference to know which standards the author may be using. I hate transliteration to begin with, but it does help sometimes. (I wish there was a law that required *stress* to be included as well.  ) I don't have a native speaker to help me through the rough spots.


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## Q-cumber

I afraid the only way to transliterate Russian words into English is to represent every letter (or at least a syllable)separately - one by one. Otherwise English pronunciation rules shall apply, thus making proper transliteration impossible.


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## xrayspex

_way to transliterate Russian words into English is to represent every letter_ 
Sometimes one letter is enough, especially with that pesky "o" pronounced as "a" thing, which I have not got the hang of yet.


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## Nanon

Ahem... transliteration is used when the original alphabet cannot be used because some people don't read it, or when we don't have the proper character set, but it is not actually meant to help learners _pronounce_ well. The phonetic alphabet - or any equivalent system - is used for that purpose.
Since I'm already off-topic I will just carry on...
You should see transliteration of some foreign names into Russian. Some of them don't look much nicer. One of the loanwords I really _don't_ like is "_peceпшн_"...

To Ptak and Crescent: just imagine that when you say "Hi" in Spanish, you say "¡Hola!" with a mute h - it sounds just like the Spanish word for wave, "ola". "Wave, my name is привет", or the other way round...


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## Athaulf

Nanon said:


> Crescent, I couldn't agree more, transliteration is ugly indeed. But for those who don't read Cyrillic it is (alas - from my point of view) necessary...
> Besides, the use of "ja" for "я", etc., does not work well in English, but it does in German, for instance (ahem... I don't speak German).
> 
> If you want to see horrible (this is for you, Crescent) and numerous systems of Romanisation, you may have a look at this page in Wikipedia. You will see that many variants can be used, but none of them helps students to pronounce well.
> 
> *ty menja ne išči*
> or
> *ty menya ne ishchi* (very common but not quite logical, though: y is used for both я and ы...)
> or
> *ty menâ ne iŝi* (I don't like this one very much either, though it is logical)
> etc...!
> 
> The second one is commonly used by English speakers, besides, it uses no diacritics.



The problem with such transliterations is that they are misleading the reader into thinking that _я _represents some special sound that is approximated by _ja_, _ya_, or whatever, as opposed to an "ordinary" _a_. While this is true in some cases (when _я_ is preceded by a vowel or a hard/soft sign, or when it's stressed at the beginning of a word), in most cases it represents the same vowel as _a_ -- but the choice between_ a_ and _я _is mandated by the quality of the preceding consonant. 

And here we get to the real problem: English has about a dozen fewer consonants than Russian. A proper transliteration of the last two letters in _меня_ would have to specify "soft _n_" + "_a_", not just "_n_" + some modified "_a_". But the English alphabet of course doesn't have a sign for a soft _n_, so it's impossible to get anything close to a satisfactory result without introducing special consonant markings. The same holds for most other consonants and the choice between _у_/_ю_, _е_/_э_, etc. 

 Of course, as Beclija has pointed out, transliterations of proper names that are widely used by complete non-speakers of Russian are best done using the closest approximation that is possible with the standard alphabet. But for the actual learners of the language, transliterations such as those above are horribly misleading, because they create wrong impressions that have to be painstakingly unlearned if one wants to understand how the Russian orthography really works. A transliteration suitable for learners has to be based on consonant marking, not replicating the differences between hard/soft indicating vowels.


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## Nanon

Athaulf, I fully agree, but can such a system be of any help for speakers who have no knowledge of phonology at all? who do not have a hard/soft consonant opposition in their system? (hem... the Russian orthography does not reflect this clearly either). I mean - if they are just beginners or need an urgent transliteration. Of course, for those wanting to learn well and to have a clear comprehension as well as a good pronunciation, one needs to know and understand these phenomena.

200% agreed, all of the above systems are horribly misleading and none is perfect: there are several of them and _all _have been modified a few times...

The point is, Zelenyj, for which purpose do you need a transliteration? who will read it? which system is the most convenient for you? According to your post it seems to be Latin English letters, thus no diacritics, thus not a perfect system, I'm afraid.


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## Athaulf

Nanon said:


> Athaulf, I fully agree, but can such a system be of any help for speakers who have no knowledge of phonology at all? who do not have a hard/soft consonant opposition in their system?



But if you want to learn a language, the very first thing you must being mastering is the phonology and orthography. In my experience, being lazy with proper pronunciation in the beginning is a very bad strategy in any language, since bad habits in pronunciation can be very hard to correct later at the intermediate and advanced stages.

Of course, if you want to learn just a few very basic phrases by heart, without any broader vocabulary and understanding of grammar, then you don't have to bother with phonology. But whoever wants to build any reasonable level of proficiency shouldn't be lazy with the proper orthography and pronunciation from the very beginning. 



> (hem... the Russian orthography does not reflect this clearly either).


Actually, it does. You can always predict the exact pronunciation of a consonant from the letters following it (or lack thereof), except perhaps for a handful of extreme counterexamples. The system is indeed a bit odd, but once you figure it out, it makes a lot sense. However, figuring it out is not trivial, and misleading transliterations can make this job much harder.


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## Nanon

Athaulf, I am not trying to argue over this, it makes sense to both of us because you learnt Russian and I learnt Russian and we know how the system works. Besides, we have some knowledge of phonology, too. But our needs for transliterations, if any, do not match the needs of a beginner. On the contrary, my own advice to learners would be to use the Russian alphabet at once! It is not so complicated and is a thousand times less tricky than any attempt at Romanisation. In the case of Russian, the alphabet is probably one of the simplest things to learn, so why shouldn't we use it whenever, and as soon as, possible.
But then, of course, not everybody has the proper keyboard setup, not everybody is an advanced learner, etc... this is why I asked about Zelenyj's  post # 1.
About predictability of pronunciation with spelling, you are right, Russian is much closer to a "perfectly clear" system than many languages. When I learnt English, I certainly knew the alphabet, but reading _without _hearing or using an _appropriate _phonetic system did not give me any clue for pronouncing. Not to speak about the dictation nightmares every French speaker remembers from childhood...


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## Athaulf

Nanon said:


> Athaulf, I am not trying to argue over this, it makes sense to both of us because you learnt Russian and I learnt Russian and we know how the system works. Besides, we have some knowledge of phonology, too.



Actually, I've never learned the language systematically, but I did make an effort to fully master its orthography so that I would be able to read it based on its extensive similarities with Croatian. It wasn't very hard because I learned the very similar Serbian Cyrillic alphabet as a kid.

I definitely agree with the rest of your post -- one should certainly learn the alphabet and start using it immediately. Someone who feels overwhelmed just by the alphabet... should probably consider switching to a non-Slavic language.


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