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TRANSLATIONS / TRANSLITERATIONS STANDARDS

    Putting a group of Litvaks together to develop standards for the transliteration and translation of records from Old Cyrillic, modern Russian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Polish, and Old German is a real challenge. Given any three Litvaks, you can always come up with nine or ten different sets of standards, and each will be convinced that he or she is right.

    What then to do?

    JRI-Poland established its transliteration standards in agreement with the Polish archives. Since LitvakSIG has no such agreement with the Lithuanian Archives, we needed to develop a standard of our own that would satisfy the majority of our researchers, yet still remain as true as possible to the original documents.

    Much of the discussion on translation and transliteration standards focused on whether the names of towns and other administrative districts should be in Yiddish, 19th century Russian, or in the current Lithuanian spelling. In the end, in order for our database to be in tied in uniformly with other searchable online databases, the decision was made to use the current Lithuanian names for all towns.

     For given names, the spelling issue was very important. While we have tried to stay as close as possible to the Library of Congress standards for transliterating Russian, this has caused a problem for many of our researchers.   Despite the wonders of the Daitch- Mokotoff system, continuous complaints regarding transliterations of common family names such as LURIE - which has shown up variously as LURIA, LUIRY, LUIRIY, etc.- occur. Similarly,  names beginning with "Y" or "J" can be particularly confusing in English when JACOB(SON) is rendered IAKOB, YUDEL(SON) becomes IUDEL, and JOFFE shows up as IOFFE, or YAFFE, etc. Then, too, there is always the possibility of seeing various Lithuanian endings added to the base surname 

    In today's Lithuanian press, for instance, America’s Bill Clinton is Lithuanian-ized to Bill Clintonas, his wife is Hillary Clintoniene and his daughter is Chelsea Clintonaite. When such suffixes are found by researchers, they do have the advantage of identifying the individual’s sex and, for females only, marital status, even when no first name is listed.

Males can have their surnames appended with: -as, -is, -ys, -us, -e or -a.

    Females with names ending in -iene (or –uviene) are married or widowed, while the endings: -aite, -yte, -ute and -iute denote unmarried women.

Examples of equivalent Lithuanian-ized last names:

    While people, naturally, become very attached to their own spelling of their family name, please keep in mind that the spellings of names -- both first and last  -- may be different from the ones you are familiar with and accustomed to. It is important to remember, moreover, that these documents were created during many different times, in different languages, and by many different people whose mother tongue was NOT Yiddish.

    This committee has thus attempted to represent not only the current United States Library of Congress  point of view, but has also attempted to maintain the spellings of familiar Yiddish names such as Moishe, rather than the more Russified Movsha. As a result, we have tried to reach a middle path in translating and transliterating names which tries to preserve established customs, approaches, and ways of viewing things while maintaining what has already been accomplished. We have tried to keep the breadth and depth of past knowledge alive in our current work, while at the same time adding new ideas to it.