egafd.com

Valerija "Shmeleva" should be Valerija Shmelyova. People with some knowledge of Russian will understand why.

I'm only mildly in favour of the death-penalty for those who ignore
diacritics : -)
It used to drive me INSANE when newsreaders said 'GorbachEv' [img]http://www.egafd.com/forum/smileys/swear.gif[/img]

... and further, there are several nuances of Cyrillic transliteration
in the DB that I'm not entirely happy with- '-ija' for '-iya' in the
above being one of them : -)

That transliteration is a cross between everyday English 'transliteration' and scientific transliteration.

That "ja" thing is to show that the syllable corresponds to the letter ja and not to compounds such as yery - a or i kratkoe - a.

All very well- but my point is that a non-Russian-speaker might
well mentally render it as 'eejjah', which is nonsense.... although
of course a German-speaker would get it right, by a sort of
lingustic accident.
English textbooks of Russian quite happily use the transliterations
'ye', 'ya' and 'yo' [and 'yoo/yu', for that matter], and the
corresponding diphthongs as 'i-ya' etc., so what's the problem
with using those forms here?

I see no reason to resort to English spellings. As far as I know, English is the only European language pronouncing letter j that way. Compare it to speakers of languages ranging from Albanian to Finnish who will pronounce "Valerija" properly.

There are currently Greek, Russian, and Japanese titles on the database. Japanese is arguably the least problematic, given its fairly uniform romanisation (the last example of non-Hepburn I saw was in an instructional kobudo video). Only two contributors submit Greek and Russian titles and they use their "own" transliteration modes, which don't really constitute much trouble for their part.

To be exact, there's also a Bulgarian title.

http://www.egafd.com/films/details.php/id/s1338

Bad Samaritan wrote:

>Compare it to speakers of languages ranging from
> Albanian to Finnish who will pronounce "Valerija" properly.
>

Germanic languages except English, Slavic languages using Latin script, Baltic languages, Estonian, Italian, Maltese...

Bad Samaritan wrote:
> I see no reason to resort to English spellings.

... apart from it being an English-language forum? The Russians
pronounce it 'iya', so why not spell it that way?

First, you're telling that nobody other than German-speakers will read the word properly and when I prove otherwise, you say that this is an English language forum (or website?) to stick to your point.

OK jj, use your very own transliteration the next time you submit a Russian title. It's just fine for me.