Last modification 03/1999

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

By Alexy Khrabrov and Serge Winitzki (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.

Software

If you need to work with different native Russian encodings and/or Russkaja Latinica, you can download a perl script to transform between various Russian encodings: ALT (DOS 866), ISO, KOI8, MAC, Unicode/UTF-8, and WIN (1252), and the "LAT" encoding, i.e. Russkaja Latinica. The script as of version 2.0 is currently the official reference implementation of the Russkaja Latinica standard. It can output and input text in any of the supported encodings (new ones are easy to add since it's an interpreted script), supports the letter "yo", has options for alternative interpretation of w and q, escape character \, supports switching to English mode, and has an option to ignore TeX commands and text within $ signs. The script has no dependence on other perl packages.

You can also download the rather old (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 (except "tshcha" :( ). 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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