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Box 6Names in non-roman alphabets (Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Korean) or character-based languages (Chinese, Japanese)

Romanization, a form of transliteration, means using the roman (Latin) alphabet to represent the letters or characters of another alphabet. A good authority for romanization is the ALA-LC Romanization Tables.

• Romanize names if they are in Cyrillic (Russian, Bulgarian, etc.), Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, or Korean, or character-based languages, such as Chinese and Japanese
• Capitalize only the first letter of romanized names if the original initial is represented by more than one letter

  • Iu. A. Iakontov;   becomes   Iakontov IuA
  • G. Th. Tsakalos;   becomes   Tsakalos GTh
• Ignore diacritics, accents, and special characters in names. This rule ignores some conventions used in non-English languages to simplify rules for English-language publications.

  • Treat letters marked with diacritics or accents as if they are not marked

    • Å   treated as   A
    • Ø   treated as   O
    • Ç   treated as   C
    • Ł   treated as   L
    • à   treated as   a
    • ĝ   treated as   g
    • ñ   treated as   n
    • ü   treated as   u
  • Treat two or more letters printed as a unit (ligated letters) as if they are two letters

    • æ   treated as   ae
    • œ   treated as   oe