So you turn the TV in Russia and, right where you expect the Closed Captions to appear, it shows “ЦХАННЕЛ ОНЕ ТЕЛЕТЕЬТ”. It’s not very difficult to guess that it should be “CHANNEL ONE TELETEXT”. It’s as if the TV can only display Cyrillic characters, so it’s receiving Latin characters and interpreting them as Cyrillic. I couldn’t find Russian standards for encoding Closed Captions, but I thought it was odd that the Latin letter “X” would be mapped to “Ь”. But then again, it’s no surprise that weird letters like “X” would be mapped to weird letters like “Ь”.

I found two other channels that show a message when you tune into them. One says “ТЖ Центер Еуропе” and the other one says “ФАБ-ТЕЛЕТЕЬТ СЪСТЕМ”. It really looks like the first one should be “TV Center Europe” and the second one “FAB-TELETEXT SYSTEM”. But now you have a “V”, a pretty regular letter which could be easily mapped to “В”, but it’s instead mapped to “Ж”. Weird.

So I started looking for ways to encode (or transliterate, or romanize) Russian with ASCII symbols. There are huge tables in Wikipedia with many possible ways to transliterate Russian, and tables for scientific transliterations, and tables for informal romanizations, but nothing matches.

By searching for the pair “Ж V”, I ended up finding this page, which is about typing Russian with a “phonetic” keyboard. I looked around and there are many such keyboards, which, following the “QWERTY” naming conventions, are called “ЯВЕРТЫ”, “ЯШЕРТЫ”, “ЯЖЕРТЫ”, etc. They are, of course, not really “phonetic”. Some of them do map “X” to “Ь”, but I could find none that map “Y” to “Ъ” — the hard sign is usually associated with some not-so-easy-to-access key. Fortunately, the “Y” is right there in “QWERTY”, so I searched for a “ЯВЕРТЪ” layout — and apparently there is one for Bulgarian, which makes sense since in Bulgarian the hard sign is far more frequent than in Russian.

If I use the Bulgarian phonetic keyboard, everything matches. Weird. This could be some setting in the TV.