Adaptation of Personal Names: Transliteration, Transcription or Renomination?

Lexical-and-semantic class of personal names is characterized with a number of specific properties and functions. Synchronically, without appealing to etymology, those individual (individualized) names fulfil a secondary nomination function due to their semiotic function, which makes it possible interpret personal names as symbolic cultural codes belonging to national linguistic worldviews. Still, in course of cross-cultural communication, linguistic contacts demand personal names be translated from one language to another one. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the possibility of adaptation of personal names conserving their own semiotic and national identity while being globally transposed both into various languages and linguistic worldviews, including the general global linguistic worldview. As is generally acknowledged, due to the in translatability of personal names, though languages of the European area reveal some correlations, the principle method to adapt them in literary and mass-media texts as well as in course of colloquial communication is the transformation of their exterior soundand-letter form, so the foreground is made by the norms and rules of transliteration on the basis of the so-called "ideal" Latin alphabet and "practical" transcription which are closely interconnected and fixed as standard ones in the documents of international associations, e.g., ISO, MFO, etc. However, the alphabets and pronouncing norms of national languages are realized controversially which inevitably leads to developing variations and the necessity to revise the established standards. The implicitly positive result of personal names adaptation is the unification of transliteration, considering that even for languages using the hieroglyphic or letter-syllabic writing systems, special alphabets are developed, e.g., pingyin for Chinese or hangul for Korean, which have to provide the conventional communication in the intersection of languages and culture.