Informal romanizations of Cyrillic

Informal or ad hoc romanizations of Cyrillic have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems. Their use faded with the advances in the Russian internet that made support of Cyrillic script standard, but resurfaced with the proliferation of instant messaging, SMS and mobile phone messaging in Russia. Due to its informal character, there was neither a well-established standard nor a common name. In the early days of e-mail, the humorous term "Volapuk encoding" (kodirovka volapyuk) was sometimes used. More recently the term "translit" emerged to indiscriminately refer to both programs that transliterate Cyrillic (and other non-Latin alphabets) into Latin, as well as the result of such transliteration. The word is an abbreviation of the term transliteration, and most probably its usage originated in several places. An example of early "translit" is the DOS program TRANSLIT by Jan Labanowski, which runs from the command prompt to convert a Cyrillic file to a Latin one using a specified transliteration table. There are two basic varieties of romanization of Russian: transliterations and Leetspeak-type of rendering of Russian text. The latter one is often heavily saturated with common English words, which are often much shorter than the corresponding Russian ones, and is sometimes referred to as Runglish or Russlish. Translit is a method of encoding Cyrillic letters with Latin ones. The term is derived from transliteration, the system of replacing letters of one alphabet with letters of another. Translit found its way into web forums, chats, messengers, emails, MMORPGs and other network games. Some Cyrillic web sites had a translit version for cases of encoding problems. As computer and network technologies developed support for the Cyrillic script, translit fell into disrepute. Sometimes translit users were ignored or even banned in Cyrillic-using communities. Translit received its last development impulse with the increasing availability of mobile phones in Cyrillic-using countries.