Hithanya — Personal-name conventions across countries | hithanya.com
Transliteration is a deterministic conversion under a published system — and mixing two systems across your documents is what breaks the record.
The scripts do not match one to one. The Russian alphabet has 33 letters — 21 consonants, 10 vowels and 2 signs — against Latin's 26, so any Cyrillic-to-Latin conversion must allocate extra characters for yo, for the two signs and for the five letters that collapse onto one Latin symbol. Different systems solve that shortage differently, which is why several legitimate spellings of one name exist.
The standards carry dates, and the dates explain old documents. GOST 16876-71 governed Cyrillic transliteration from 1971 until GOST 7.79-2000 replaced it with two systems, A and B; ISO 9:1995 and BGN/PCGN give yet other spellings for the same letters. Pinyin was adopted in China in 1958 and registered as ISO 7098 in 1982. South Korea replaced McCune-Reischauer (1939) with Revised Romanization in 2000 — the reason a pre-2000 atlas prints Pusan while a current passport prints Busan.
The procedure has five steps. First, gather every document you already hold and note the exact Latin spelling on each. Second, choose one system — in practice the one your passport's machine-readable zone already uses. Third, convert the name once, character by character, under that system. Fourth, check the result against the physical limits: two MRZ lines of 44 characters under ICAO Doc 9303, with truncation past the limit and extra given names collapsing to one initial each. Fifth, reuse that single spelling on the visa, the ticket and every later form.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Mind the characters that change length. German expands three umlauts plus the sharp s into ae, oe, ue and ss, each of those four characters taking two slots in a machine-readable field. Pinyin marks Mandarin's four tones, but passport transliteration drops them, leaving one written form covering several readings; Vietnamese writes six tones with five marks on a 29-letter alphabet that plain fields cannot reproduce. In every case the base letters are what survive — so the base letters must match everywhere.
When an old document disagrees with a new one, do not average the two spellings. Keep the passport spelling as the master version, and where a form offers an 'other names used' box, list the older spelling there — that is how Pusan-era and Busan-era versions of one life stay linked to one person.
Order and spelling are separate problems: the name-order page fixes which element goes in which field, the patronymics page fixes which elements exist at all, and this page fixes how the surviving string is written. Do all three once, and every later form is copying, not deciding.
Further reading