It seems that each country metting a passport has its own national rules for transliterating people names on passports. They will display the national alphabet, just extended with some national transliteration rules for other alphabets (to Basic Latin with few extensions, or using just letters of Latin alphabets commonly used in regional languages; in Japan or China, they could possibly use the simplified bopomofo alphabet or kana syllabaries), or they will ask to people to define and register their own transliteration in the national registry.
Passports also contain other transliterated items, such as toponyms and country names (but countries are also encoded or shown at least in English; European passports contain a few static preprinted texts in a dozen of languages, using Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets for the national languages; but not everything is translated). They contain also dates and numbers, using Western Arabic digits. But official seals will display anything. I have absolutely no information about what is encoded in the machine readable part of my passport, or in accompanying leaflets or stickers applied on it like visas, or if this data is updated when crossing a border. But I know that this data contains now some biometric data (more to come) and a digitally signed photograph and personal signature (the content of this data is subject to changes, notably because of US demands, some travelers need a new accompanying form added to their existing passport for travelling to US or via US, that they'll get when requesting a visa, some old passports are also refused and need to be changed). Not everything is in the passport, and travel agencies will also request other information that will be transmitted before authorizing the trip. My opinion is that there's no stable standard, countries are changing their rules every year by mutual negociations or additional national restrictions or after special international events (they will inform the travel agencies). Travelers should be informed by travel agencies about the procedures for visas and their scope (if the visas or national identity cards are valid across multiple countries within a free travel area whose member countries apply the same rules). Some day will come where some countries will request ADN identification data realized in the origin country and certified by its approved national labs, or will take sealed ADN samples when entering their country (for short touristic trips, it may be analyzed later if the person does not leave the country after expiration of the visa or does not take his return flight sold by the travel agency, to save costs of labs analysis in the visited country). But digitaly signed biometric data or photos are completely out of scope of Unicode. 2013/7/5 Richard Wordingham <richard.wording...@ntlworld.com> > On Thu, 04 Jul 2013 22:19:11 -0700 > Stephan Stiller <stephan.stil...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hi folks, > > > > For languages whose alphabets aren't too far apart (I'm thinking > > mostly of the set of Latin-derived alphabets), what is a good place > > for finding out how letter replacements for letters that are missing > > in a different country/locale are done? > > A good source might be the rules for the name in the first line of the > 'machine readable passports'. Unfortunately, a quick hunt on the > internet failed to find any such rules. > > Richard. > >