But they are pretty consistent. It's almost always Kovalev instead of Kovalyov, Kulemin instead of Kulyomin and so on. The only well-known example where they made an exception is when a guy with the first name Semyon entered the league. They figured it wouldn't be a good look to have someone spelled "Semen" on the roster, so they restored to the correct spelling for a change.
I doubt it and anyway, a young Russian athlete is unlikely to have the motivation or even education to start arguing about the spelling and pronunciation of his name in a foreign alphabet and language. I mean, even the Soviet news agency finally surrendered to the perpetual misspelling of "Gorbachev" in the English-speaking world in 1988.
I'd argue that spelling the name right with one additional letter (Kovalyov) or somewhat right with zero additional letters (Kovalov) trumps remembering a wrong name, but whatever.
Right and that's exactly where the fact that Russian uses a different alphabet offers an advantage. Save for a few diacritical signs, French uses the same alphabet as English so you can read it - but to pronounce it? That's hard for anyone who isn't familiar with the language. Russian on the other hand isn't even readable if you don't know the Cyrillic letters so you have to transliterate it into your own alphabet, and in that process you are able to choose a spelling that mirrors closely how to pronounce the word. You don't use the original Ковалёв anyway, then why not turn it into Kovalyov instead of Kovalev?
But the situation is what it is and I don't expect it to change, that much I agree with you on. I merely wanted to point out that the pronunciation ("Kovalov") the announcer used is actually closer to being correct than the pronunciation and spelling commonly used (even by the NHL).
Ha, okay you've convinced me. As long as the transliterations are equally short, then yes I agree they should be used (if they result in more accurate pronunciation).
I don't think we should call current ones "misspellings", though. They're just particular transliterations. Maybe not the best ones, but technically not misspellings.
My point was, no matter how you render foreign names, the locals are always gonna butcher pronunciations because of people's inability to speak beyond their own syllabary. This is more acute, I think, in English North America, since it's a vast, largely mono-lingual place.
I live in Japan. Japanese, as rendered in roman letters, is almost perfectly readable, just as much as Japanese characters are (in fact, far easier for Japanese to read than Japanese kanji). You would therefore think that North Americans could handle "Tokyo" (tou-kyou), but no -- they normally add an extra syllable to become To-Ki-O, which sounds ridiculous locally.
