A Bulgarian passport says Georgi. An old university diploma says Gueorgui. A bank in Frankfurt has him down as Georgy. Three documents, one person, and a compliance officer who now wants an explanation. Anyone who has moved paperwork between Sofia and an English speaking country has met this problem, and it comes down to the way Cyrillic to English conversion actually works.
Transliteration is not translation
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Translation carries meaning across languages. Transliteration carries letters across alphabets, one symbol at a time, with no attempt to convey what the word means. A surname is not translated, it is respelled.
That respelling is governed by rules, and the rules have changed more than once. The Cyrillic script has thirty letters in its Bulgarian form, several of which have no clean single letter equivalent in the Latin alphabet. Somebody has to decide what to do with them, and different institutions have decided differently over the decades.
Why the same name has several spellings
Bulgaria adopted a streamlined official system in 2009, when the Transliteration Act fixed one standard for personal names, place names and official documents. Before that, a French influenced convention was widespread, which is why older documents produce Gueorgui rather than Georgi and Djambazov rather than Dzhambazov.
International standards add another layer. Scientific transliteration used in libraries and academic citation uses diacritics that ordinary passports never contain. The result is that the romanization of Bulgarian is not one system but several coexisting ones, each correct within its own context.
The letters that cause most of the trouble
A handful of characters account for the majority of disputes. Ж becomes zh, ч becomes ch, ш becomes sh and щ becomes sht, which is specific to Bulgarian and often mishandled by software built for Russian. Ц is ts. Ю and я become yu and ya.
The genuinely awkward one is ъ, which in Bulgarian is a full vowel rather than a hard sign. The official system renders it as a, so Търново becomes Tarnovo. Older or foreign systems produce Turnovo or Trnovo, and all three appear in circulation. If a client insists that their document is wrong because the town is spelled differently on a map, this is usually why.
What this means for official documents
Consistency beats correctness in almost every administrative context. If a passport says one thing, every document submitted alongside it should say the same thing, even where a newer standard would suggest otherwise. Authorities are matching strings, not evaluating linguistic merit.
Professional practice therefore starts with a question rather than a rule. Which spelling appears on the identity document that will accompany this file? A good translator will ask for it before starting, and will note any variation explicitly rather than silently harmonising it. Immigration files in particular are unforgiving, which is why the USCIS translation requirements place so much weight on completeness and a signed statement of accuracy rather than on elegance.
Machine transliteration and where it breaks
Automatic tools handle the straightforward letters well. They fail in three predictable places. They apply Russian conventions to Bulgarian text, they lose the distinction between a personal name and a common noun that happens to look identical, and they cannot know which historical spelling a person already uses on their documents.
They also struggle with mixed content. A medical record containing Latin drug names, Cyrillic patient details and abbreviations in both scripts will come out of a converter looking plausible and being wrong in exactly the places that matter.
Place names, companies and trademarks
Cities usually have an established English exonym, so Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna cause no trouble. Smaller towns do not, and the safest source is the spelling used by Bulgarian official signage and government publications since 2009.
Company names are a separate case again. A registered entity has one legal name, and if it has registered a Latin script version itself, that version wins regardless of what any transliteration table says. Checking the commercial register takes two minutes and prevents a contract from naming a company that does not formally exist.
Practical advice for anyone handling Bulgarian paperwork
Collect the identity document first and treat its spelling as the anchor. Keep a short glossary for every recurring client so that names, job titles and institutions stay identical across a whole file. Flag inconsistencies to the client rather than fixing them quietly, because a mismatch they know about is far easier to explain to an authority than one discovered at the counter.
Where documents will cross borders, certification usually matters as much as accuracy. Working with a provider that offers certified document translation services means the transliteration decisions come with a signature behind them, which is what the receiving institution is really asking for.
A small detail with large consequences
None of this is glamorous work. It is letter by letter, checked against a document somebody keeps in a drawer. But a single mismatched vowel can hold up a residence permit, a property sale or a pension claim for months, and getting it right the first time costs nothing more than asking one careful question at the start.
