About

Transliteration errors in official documents cause passport rejections, database mismatches, and legal disputes over name spelling. Each Slavic language follows a distinct national standard: Russia uses the ICAO-derived passport system codified in Federal Migration Service Order 320/2013, Bulgaria follows the Transliteration Act (Закон за транслитерацията), and Ukraine applies Cabinet of Ministers Resolution 55-2010. These standards differ in how they map identical Cyrillic glyphs. For example, the letter Х becomes kh in Russian but h in Ukrainian. The letter Щ maps to shch in Russian and sht in Bulgarian. This tool applies the correct national mapping table with position-aware rules, digraph disambiguation, and case preservation. It does not approximate. It implements the full published ruleset for each standard. Limitation: the tool cannot detect language automatically. You must select the correct region. Mixed-language texts should be processed per-segment.

Formulas

Transliteration is a deterministic mapping function. For an input string S of length n, the output T is produced by a single left-to-right pass with greedy digraph matching:

T = n∑i=0 map(S_i, R, ctx)

Where R is the selected region ruleset (generic, bg, ru, ua), and ctx is the positional context (word-initial, word-medial, preceding character). The algorithm attempts the longest match first. For Ukrainian, зг at position i is checked before з alone, producing zgh to disambiguate from ж → zh. Case is preserved by detecting isUpperCase(S_i) and applying title-case or all-caps to the output token accordingly.

The position-aware rules for Ukrainian follow Resolution 55-2010: letters Є, Ї, Й, Ю, Я use digraph forms (ye, yi, yu, ya) at word start, and shortened forms (ie, i, iu, ia) elsewhere.

Reference Data

Cyrillic	Generic (ISO 9)	Bulgarian	Russian	Ukrainian
А а	A a	A a	A a	A a
Б б	B b	B b	B b	B b
В в	V v	V v	V v	V v
Г г	G g	G g	G g	H h
Ґ ґ	G̀ g̀	-	-	G g
Д д	D d	D d	D d	D d
Е е	E e	E e	E e	E e
Ё ё	Ë ë	-	E e	-
Є є	Ê ê	-	-	Ye ye / ie
Ж ж	Ž ž	Zh zh	Zh zh	Zh zh
З з	Z z	Z z	Z z	Z z
И и	I i	I i	I i	Y y
І і	Ì ì	-	-	I i
Ї ї	Ï ï	-	-	Yi yi / i
Й й	J j	Y y	I i	Y y / i
К к	K k	K k	K k	K k
Л л	L l	L l	L l	L l
М м	M m	M m	M m	M m
Н н	N n	N n	N n	N n
О о	O o	O o	O o	O o
П п	P p	P p	P p	P p
Р р	R r	R r	R r	R r
С с	S s	S s	S s	S s
Т т	T t	T t	T t	T t
У у	U u	U u	U u	U u
Ф ф	F f	F f	F f	F f
Х х	H h	H h	Kh kh	Kh kh
Ц ц	C c	Ts ts	Ts ts	Ts ts
Ч ч	Č č	Ch ch	Ch ch	Ch ch
Ш ш	Š š	Sh sh	Sh sh	Sh sh
Щ щ	Šč šč	Sht sht	Shch shch	Shch shch
Ъ ъ	ʺ	A a	(omitted)	-
Ы ы	Y y	-	Y y	-
Ь ь	ʹ	(omitted)	(omitted)	(omitted)
Э э	È è	-	E e	-
Ю ю	Û û	Yu yu	Yu yu	Yu yu / iu
Я я	Â â	Ya ya	Ya ya	Ya ya / ia

Frequently Asked Questions

Characters outside the active transliteration map pass through unchanged. Latin letters, digits, punctuation, and Unicode symbols are preserved as-is. Only characters present in the selected region's Cyrillic mapping table are converted.

Ukrainian Cabinet Resolution 55-2010 defines position-dependent rules. Letters Є, Ї, Й, Ю, and Я use extended digraph forms (ye, yi, y, yu, ya) at word-initial position and contracted forms (ie, i, i, iu, ia) in word-medial or word-final position. The tool detects word boundaries by checking if the preceding character is a non-letter.

Generic mode follows ISO 9 (1995), which uses diacritical marks (č, š, ž, û, â) to create a strict one-to-one reversible mapping. National standards (Bulgarian, Russian, Ukrainian) use ASCII-only multi-character sequences (ch, sh, zh, yu, ya), which are not reversible but are required for passports and official documents in each country.

When the Ukrainian region is active, the digraph зг is explicitly matched and rendered as zgh. This prevents confusion with ж which maps to zh. The algorithm uses greedy lookahead: at each position, it checks for a two-character match before falling back to single-character mapping.

Yes. Per the Bulgarian Transliteration Act, Ъ maps to A (or a) in all positions. The tool applies this uniformly. The soft sign Ь is omitted entirely in Bulgarian transliteration as specified by the Act.

The mapping tables match the published government standards. However, passport offices may apply additional discretionary rules or legacy spellings. Use this tool as a reference, not as a certified authority. Always verify with your local migration service.

If the source character is uppercase and the next character is lowercase (title case context), the output is title-cased: Shch. If both the current and next source characters are uppercase (all-caps context), the output is fully uppercased: SHCH. Single uppercase letters produce uppercase output: Б → B.