The Proposal for Russian Transliteration Standard ("Russkaja latinica")

By Aleksej Hrabrov and Sergej Vinickij

Russkaja Latinica is a proposal for a set of rules to transliterate Russian texts using Latin letters. Our goal is to develop an unambiguous and intuitive coding system allowing for automated 1-to-1 conversion of Russian texts from latinized Russian to various native codings and back.

The Overview of Russkaja Latinica contains motivation for and comments on the proposal.

The complete set of proposed Russkaja Latinica rules is found here, for programmers' reference.

Read the Russkaja Latinica User's Guide for extensive examples and explanations of the rules. Most of the rules are very intuitive and flexible, but it's important to stick to them.

If you need to work with different native Russian encodings and/or Russkaja Latinica, you can download the latest (7/30/95) version of my (S. W.'s) software package for transliteration and conversion between various Russian encodings: Koi-8, Koi-7, DOS alternative, Windows, Macintosh, and Russkaja Latinica. The package is nearly finished. All currently declared features of Russkaja Latinica are supported. Sources in ANSI C are provided, as well as the MSDOS executables (since they are very small); porting and modification should be easy. All use, copying, distribution, and modification of this software is allowed free of charge, provided that any modifications are marked as such and the source code is distributed with the (modified) software or otherwise made available to users free of charge.

Related stuff

Mail to the authors if you have comments or suggestions.

Credits

S. W. is grateful to Valery Fradkov who made several important suggestions (among them, the need to include English text and the letter "tshcha").
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