tin ear names

What is this?
In Soviet SF they used to parade a lot of Anglophone persons, and rarely got their names to sound right. I remember one "Rai Rup" - supposedly a rich American. Ever heard of anyone called Rye Roop? Me neither.

But let's see it the other way around, how do the Anglophones imagine foreign names. The days of Soviet isolationism are gone, the Web has covered the Earth, we're supposed to move freely and can access anything in a nanojiffy, right? Not always so - sometimes, nothing beats laziness.
7-III-2008 - 3-VIII-2023 go home  
Imaginary
Known in Serbian as
A better alternative
Padopoulos
Papadopulos
Ursula K. LeGuin was known after all the imaginary names which she built deftly and with exquisit sense of the (equally imaginary) place where they came to be.
This time, in "Newton's sleep", she deals with the only successful generation ship leaving the dying Earth, and there are real earthen names for the crew. Except this one.
Vaselov, Alexi
Vasiljev, Aleksej
Vasilev, Aleksei. Mind you, this is Stargate in 2004, when I personally knew a dozen Russians in the US, any of which could have rectified this, but nobody bothered to turn brain on.
Bogdonovich
Bogdanović
in „Accusations“ by Lois Tilton, 2nd novel in Babylon 5 universe. Obviously Straczinsky didn't see this, he'd know. There's Bogdanov in russian, Bogdanović in serbian, and I'd say it's impossible that the writer never heard of Peter Bogdanovich.
Vukadinovid
Vukadinović
Vukadinović is a real surname, ć may look like d to fourth-grade OCR software.Jeffry A. Landis should have learnt not to trust OCR. He could actually try to check some facts, even if he writes SF.
Rai Rup, or Rai Roop
Ray, perhaps, but in russian Rai sounds like Rye...
Aleksey Tolstoy couldn't really have a clue as to what normal american names were at the time. So he took a shot and missed.
Nicolov
Nikolov
spelling k as c is regular in romanic languages, and a few germanic languages where they borrowed from latin or from the first bunch; in slavic languages it never happened.Found in fench movie „Chrysalis“, 1996.
Kovak
Kovač, Kovács
I to u špansko engleskom filmu
Siropopolous
Siropopulos (Siropopoulos)
...because out of ten most popular greek surnames, ten end with ...poulos, and none with ....popolous. Deaf of the day, Larry Niven in "Ptavvs".
Kalishikov
Kalašnjikov
"the Kalishikov assault weapon" - [Reuters, 12-28-2016] or Chuck Sheppard retelling it. One would imagine they would have heard that it's Kalashnikov. It's a famous name.
Travnik
it's a name of a city in Bosnia, not a person's name
OK it's almost sixty years too late to fix this, but Dan Barry used this as a villain's name in an episode of Flash Gordon
Przewalksi
Przewalski
Mary Rosenblum in "Lion walk" - c'mon, how hard is it to look it up? This wasn't written in XIX century, it's after 2010 - so it's ten seconds. Once is a typo, twice is tired typo, three times is stupid.
Palaelogos
Paleolog
Not that this version of the name is nonexistent... but the historically correct Paleologos (or Palaiologos) wins 30:1 when googling, and the latter covers only an inscription on a roman coin.
Kvass
a russian soft drink with a slight fizz, made of bread water and yeast
Alternately, write a new version of "Beyond the wall", mr Justin Stanchfield, and have an American as a character whose only born name is Pepsi.