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Comment by jdlan | Hacker News Reader

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I didn't expect people to not know that there are more then just accents when it comes to non us-ascii letters. Quite an eyeopener for how shortsighted people can be.

Also it is discrimination because it's a different name and the difference can lead to issues which can cause non small monetary harm.

That's why God invented transliteration.

In legal documents you transliterate from foreign alphabets to the local one according to legal rules on how the transliteration should be performed. In this case, all the "incompatible" letters are a key part of the local language, which the bank is required to support - most of the world is not like USA which famously doesn't technically implement the concept of an official language.

But technically your point about transliteration is a valid solution (and one that I have actually seen in practice in banking systems) - the bank is free to transliterate the name to something that fits in ECBDIC, as long as it also then appropriately transliterates it back to use the proper name in the documents and communication. The law doesn't mandate any technical nuances of data storage, as long as they get the proper result.

>That's why God invented transliteration.

Do you have a source for that?

How do you transliterate "Élya" ?

The key point here is that it's not an English-speaking country where being limited to English would be acceptable.

There are official state languages, which have official alphabets, which include non-English letters. There are legal names of people and organizations which include non-English letters.

The law requires the bank to have and apply correct customer information, and spelling someone's official name wrong is simply not acceptable.

i want you to log off this website and not come back, holy moly.

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