# English websites in the Cyrillic alphabet?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-websites-in-the-cyrillic-alphabet/229163>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [February 14, 2004, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-websites-in-the-cyrillic-alphabet/229163 "2004-02-14T04:49:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![zweisamkeit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zweisamkeit/32/4360_2.png) [@zweisamkeit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zweisamkeit)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2004, 4:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-websites-in-the-cyrillic-alphabet/229163/1 "2004-02-14T04:49:54Z")

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Last summer I decided to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. I kind of got the hang of it, but haven’t used it much / read much with it since I’ve been busy with classes. I’d like to practise again, though (eventually I’d like to take Russian classes, but even the alphabet itself is neat).

Problem is, it’s hard practising by reading Russian websites, because I don’t really know what I’m reading, you know? So are there any English language websites that are in Cyrillic out there, that I can use?

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**Author:** ![The\_Broken\_Column](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9bd4f/32.png) [@The\_Broken\_Column](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Broken_Column)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2004, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-websites-in-the-cyrillic-alphabet/229163/2 "2004-02-14T06:26:31Z")

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I don’t think I understand what you are saying…

[http://bablefish.altavista.com](http://bablefish.altavista.com)

Go there, you can type in the URL to the Russian website you can’t understand, and you can thus see a translation.

It’s not the best translation, but you’ll get the idea.

Translate this: Переводите это. If that says “Translate this” you should be good to go 🙂

My spelling could be bad :o but hopefully I got that right 🙂

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**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2004, 6:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-websites-in-the-cyrillic-alphabet/229163/3 "2004-02-14T06:33:18Z")

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No, that’s not what he meant. Babelfish will translate _into Russian_. **zweisamkeit** is looking for sites in which English is written using the Cyrillic alphabet. I doubt there are any such things. Some English language learning resources might have a few words written down like that.

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**Author:** ![Daver914](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4da419/32.png) [@Daver914](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Daver914)\
**Post date:** [February 14, 2004, 6:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-websites-in-the-cyrillic-alphabet/229163/4 "2004-02-14T06:54:55Z")

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English is hard \*enough \* to write in the Latin alphabet, given that our sounds no longer correspond exactly with our letters. Therein lies the rub: when you write English using Cyrillic letters, do you transliterate by spelling, or by sound?

A Russian friend taught me to write some things transliterated by sound ( e.g. Dave -\> Деив ), but that gets annoying fast . I can’t imagine reading an entire page of “Кан ю рид дис? Йз йт Ингйш? Йз йт Рашйн?”

On the other hand, a language like Spanish or Finnish, with a better letter-to-sound correlation, would work pretty much the same in Latin or Cyrillic.