The Challenges of “Internationalizing” a Language in the Digital Age: A Corpus-Linguistic Study of Transliteration and Morphological Adaptation in Rendering Kazakh Cyrillic Names in English

This article presents the challenges of transliterating Kazakh proper names written in the Cyrillic script into English, especially against the backdrop of the government-led transformation of the Kazakh writing system from Cyrillic to Latin script, which has been underway since 2017 and is poised to pass its first milestone in 2029. The aim of the transformation is to make the Kazakh language more easily understandable and international. This turn towards internationalization has also led to more prolific translation from Kazakh into English, which in turn has brought about a significant degree of variation in spelling in English, even when pertaining to key figures and names from the Kazakh culture and history (cf. Abai/Abay, etc. for the poet, philosopher and reformer Abai Qunanbaiuly). The article analyzes the degree of variation by using corpus-linguistic methodology. To this end, we constructed a corpus of English subpages of several official/institutional Kazakhstani websites (the government, higher education, etc.). We use this corpus to identify the Kazakh names with the highest degree of variation in their English equivalents and create categories of potentially problematic names in terms of transliteration, as well as in terms of morphological adaption of competitive Russified and Kazakh forms.