Russian Passport Name Transliteration

Why passport spellings look unfamiliar

The ICAO table is designed for machines, not for English readers. It turns every Cyrillic letter into a fixed string of capital letters without diacritics, so the result can be read at any border. Familiar English spellings like Yulia, Natalya or Alexey do not come out of it: the table gives IULIIA, NATALIA and ALEKSEI. The soft sign disappears (Ильич is ILICH), Ё loses its dots (Фёдор is FEDOR) and the hard sign becomes IE (Объедков is OBIEEDKOV).

Older Russian passports used other systems, so a person may hold documents with two or three spellings of the same name: Yuliya, Yulia, Iuliia. Each was correct under the rules that applied when it was issued.

Which spelling goes on a translation

For a USCIS filing, the spelling in the passport the person holds now. An officer compares every document in a petition with the identity document, and a translation that spells the name a third way creates a question nobody needs. When we translate a Russian birth, marriage or divorce certificate, we ask for the passport spellings of everyone named and use them throughout the set. For people with no Latin-script document, such as parents named on a birth certificate, we apply the ICAO table so the spelling is predictable and consistent.

If you already filed something with a different spelling, tell us. We keep the passport spelling and can list the earlier variant in a translator's note.

Patronymics and surnames

A Russian document gives a surname, a given name and a patronymic (Ivanovich, Petrovna). Russian international passports do not show the patronymic in the Latin field; a translation of a civil record does, because it is part of the record. It is transliterated, not translated, and not moved into a US "middle name" field unless your own forms already do so.

Surnames change form by gender: Ivanov and Ivanova are the same family name. A translation keeps the form the document uses for each person.

Ukrainian, Belarusian and other Cyrillic names

The ICAO table has different values for some letters in other languages: Г is H in Ukrainian and Belarusian, И is Y in Ukrainian. Ukrainian names have their own official table, in the Ukrainian transliteration tool.