According to the international tradition the original Roman spelling of foreign proper names should be preserved in all the target languages with Latin-based alphabets. This rule is applied to all the source languages, no matter whether they use a romanized alphabet for the internal purpose or not. It’s a great mistake to think that it is applied to languages with alphabets on the Latin basis only. Therefore in case if for this or that source language another system of writing is used, a uniform system of romnaization should be used. Such synonymous systems of romanization were created for such languages as Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Greek. There’s such a tradition: spelling rules of a particular language are not applied to foreign proper names. Moreover, people in the West are more interested in spelling rather than in pronunciation (it’s impossible to make foreigners pronounce proper names in absolutely the same way as native-speakers do). Actually romanized alphabets should exist for all the languages at least as an auxiliary alphabet with some particular purposes including the "export" variant of spelling proper names, international telegraph, e-mail etc. This parallel Roman alphabet should be actually an exact equivalent of the national system of writing, an integral part of the national orthography. The Terminological Commission of Natural Sciences (Terminologhichna komisija z pryrodnychykh nauk TKPN) of Kyiv Shevchenko University has worked out a new exact, synonymous and unambiguous system of romanization of the Ukrainian as well as Russian and Byelorussian Cyrillic characters [2] which would correspond to the international requirements formulated by A.A.Reformatskij [1] concerning transliteration. First of all it is linguistically neutral (it is not based upon the English or Czech alphabet only). It guarantees the inverted transliteration back to the Cyrillic spelling without any ambiguity. And the main thing is that the authors have worked out special software for this purpose. The opponents of this system (such as the Institute of the Ukrainian language of the National Academy of Sciences etc.) declare that Ukrainians should be concerned how people in other countries read Ukrainian proper names in a proper way (such a pun is not deliberate!). They elaborated the system adapted to the English language [http://www.rada.kiev.ua/translit.htm], which is counted on the English language only and actually is not applied to other at least European languages. However their statements are not earnest because nobody in the world is concerned in such things. All the peoples (especially Europeans) try to preserve their original spelling.

References: 1. Реформатский А.А. Транслитерация русских текстов латинскими буквами // Вопросы языкознания, 1960. — Но. 5. — П. 96-103. 2. Вакуленко М.О. Про ”складні” проблеми українського правопису. — Київ, 1996.