I like how they translate/transliterate his name into Serbian: Stiv Voznijak.
Wish more languages would do that and not try to keep the original spelling just because.
Wish more languages would do that and not try to keep the original spelling just because.
Paradoxically, Serbian belongs in the group "write as you hear"; the mapping between writing and pronunciation is quite simple and uniform in slavic languages. It is English, that you have to learn twice -- first time to speak, second time to spell.
Yes, I understand this: being a Spanish native speaker, I had to learn the rules of pronunciation of the English language. Spanish is also pronounced as written, mostly.
You can figure it out, so it's still better to spell English names in English, Serb names in Serb, and so on. The only concession I will make is leaving out extraneous accents and glyphs in informal writing (e.g. written accents; I will accept if they are omitted and substituted by the closest glyph in your language).
"Translating" names is something I really, really dislike. In this particular case, it's extra silly, since everybody who cares already knows who Woz is and will read his name correctly, Serbs included. This is not some random person whose name they just heard for the first time.
It’s no big deal.
There was a Mexican dude whose parents named him Joe, but they pronounced it something close to /Dzoe’/, so neither /Dzou/ nor /Xoe/. I think he was better off going by Joe over here.
But John and Joao are definitely not the same name. If someone asks you "is your name John or Joao?", even in Brazil there's only one right answer. At best you can say "both names can trace their origin to the same root name", but they are not the same name.
The Mexican guy's name or your anecdote is named Joe (but pronounced like he or his parents wanted it). There are no two ways about it.
In Argentina and Uruguay some people are called "Jonathan", only pronounced "Shonatan" (or in some Spanish pronunciations, "Yonatan"). That's the way it is.
Finally, phonetically spelling the name and surname of a known celebrity, as in Wozniak's case, just seems silly to me.
Is the president of the US You Baiden? That's a phonetic spelling in Spanish, after all! (Silly, right?).
If your name could be both John and Joao, then that would be, "Yes!"
Can you do that in general if you don't know the actual language, though? Even native English speakers sometimes have issues with certain borrowed French words, despite those being in English.
Jumped couple of time seeing Cyrillic "Питхон", though)
I love localized names. So I like what the Serbians did for Steve here.
In any event it’s his name but it’s their language and they get to spell it according to their transliteration rules.
I can't speak for China, but I can speak for Japan. I occasionally transliterate my name for one reason or another, but 99% of the time I'm rocking my name the way I identify with it. Don't mistake me for not participating the local culture. I speak the language, the government (city and federal), and my employer, a local firm, all use my latin name on all official documents and informal communications. My coworkers and friends will usually use my latin spelling as well. Bear in mind, these are usually mixed-provenance sentences where they'll switch to latin for my name in the middle of an otherwise fully native sentence. I'm happy to transliterate it when the situation calls for it but I'd prefer it not be forced on me if it can be helped.
To answer a sibling comment, do I identify it more spoken or written, I would say the written form. I'm tolerant of accents, foreign languages with separate syllabaries, verbal typos, and other such errata, so I don't really care strongly how my name is pronounced as long as an earnest attempt is made.