Cyrillization

Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad hoc fashion, the term "cyrillization" usually refers to a consistent system applied, for example, to transcribe names of German, Chinese, or English people and places for use in Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Macedonian or Bulgarian newspapers and books.

Cyrillization is analogous to romanization, when words from a non-Latin script-using language are rendered in the Latin alphabet for use (e.g., in English, German, or Francophone literature.)

Just as with various Romanization schemes, each Cyrillization system has its own set of rules, depending on: When the source language uses a fairly phonetic spelling system (e.g., Spanish, Turkish), a Cyrillization scheme may often be adopted that almost amounts to a transliteration, i.e., using a mapping scheme that simply maps each letter of the source alphabet to some letter of the destination alphabet, sometimes augmented by position-based rules.

Among the examples are the Practical transcription of English into Russian (Russian: Правила англо-русской практической транскрипции), which aims to render English words into Russian based on their sounds, and Transliteration of foreign words by a Cyrillic alphabet (uk:Транслітерація іншомовних слів кирилицею) and Cyrillization of the English language (uk:Кирилізація англійської мови) in the case of Ukrainian.

While this scheme is mostly accepted by a majority of Russian and Ukrainian authors and publishers, transcription variants are not uncommon.