"One of the worst bugbears to possess is one that is shared by hardly anyone else. It's lonely being the only person who cares about something. It's even lonelier when the thing you care about makes you want to stamp your feet, tear your hair out and run naked into the streets while making the face of Edvard Munch's The Scream. And so it is for me whenever I see a film poster, headline, book cover or screen caption featuring the incorrect use of the Cyrillic alphabet."
"The most famous of these alphabetical abominations include the opening credits for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat (where his name is given in Cyrillic as Lyaiold Schwlyazeieggeya) and the posters for the movies The Death of Stalin, Chernobyl Diaries and Borat. The name of the eponymous fake Kazakh, for example, is rendered as RT. This reads clearly as Voyadt in Cyrillic. I did not suffer decades of learning Russian and Ukrainian to deserve this cerebral meltdown."
Feeling alone in caring about incorrect Cyrillic use can provoke strong frustration. Designers often replace letters to produce faux Cyrillic, producing misspellings like STLIN instead of STALIN that change meaning. The intention behind faux Cyrillic is to signal easternness or exoticism, not to render authentic language. Famous examples include Red Heat credits and posters for The Death of Stalin, Chernobyl Diaries and Borat. Faux Cyrillic misrepresents the scripts of roughly 250 million Cyrillic users, including Azeris, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Serbians and Kazakhs. Such practice offends literate readers and undermines accurate representation of Cyrillic languages.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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