The Name Game - Cyrillic/English Problems

[gmjungbluth 0]

Dear all,

Please help with any advice guidance on this perhaps esoteric question....

My wife Svetlana and I were married in Moscow this spring, and she took my last name, and has started changing all of her official documents into the cyrillic transliteration in preparation for our move to the States (we filed a DCF in early March, petition approved, interview scheduled for June 26 yay!).

At the very Soviet-era passport bureau, they refused to transliterate her last name on her international passport back into English the way we spell it- they said that is impossible, and affixed a machine-derived phoenetic transliteration that is far off my familial spelling.

My question is as follows - On all of our official applications and petitions to the embassy, our last names are spelled the same (as Jungbluth). But will the new rogue transliteration in her passport be a problem? Which last name will go in the immigrant visa? While this is an administrative quirk at best, it would be quite a tragedy to go through all these bureaucratic nightmares here in Russia to get our names changed only to have them different once we get to the US!

Thank you for any assistance or empathy in advance!

George and Sveta

[ribki 0]

I don't know if it would help you any, but still... I had the same problem here in Ukraine when I applied for my international passport after taking my husband's family name. At first the lady refused to spell the family name the way I wanted her to spell it in English. I started telling her that it just had to be spelled that way. She had to make a couple of phone calls to get some advice from other bureaucrats. Finally, they came up with the plan. I wrote a "zayavlenie" (it kind of a petition) that said that I am asking them to spell my family name this certain way and we attached a copy of my husband's Ukrainian visa where (fortunately) the embassy of Ukraine in America spelled both Ukrainian and English names correctly.

Maybe it would be worth going back to that office and demanding they would do it the right way.

[Yodrak 7]

George and Svetlana,

Have you seen that question on many of the forms that asks for 'other names used'? Put the passport spelling there.

The name on the visa should match the name on the passport.

Yodrak

Dear all,

Please help with any advice guidance on this perhaps esoteric question....

My wife Svetlana and I were married in Moscow this spring, and she took my last name, and has started changing all of her official documents into the cyrillic transliteration in preparation for our move to the States (we filed a DCF in early March, petition approved, interview scheduled for June 26 yay!).

At the very Soviet-era passport bureau, they refused to transliterate her last name on her international passport back into English the way we spell it- they said that is impossible, and affixed a machine-derived phoenetic transliteration that is far off my familial spelling.

My question is as follows - On all of our official applications and petitions to the embassy, our last names are spelled the same (as Jungbluth). But will the new rogue transliteration in her passport be a problem? Which last name will go in the immigrant visa? While this is an administrative quirk at best, it would be quite a tragedy to go through all these bureaucratic nightmares here in Russia to get our names changed only to have them different once we get to the US!

Thank you for any assistance or empathy in advance!

George and Sveta