Asklemmy

I technically have three names (given name, patronymic, family name). I've lived in a few countries, all with different name systems. I've found that this is the best easiest rule set to avoid trouble:

• If possible, use only the first and family name, those are very widely understood.
  • If possible, when making a passport in your country of origin, request that those are the only names recorded, and they are transliterated into latin according to some official (or at least widely recognized) ruleset.
• If possible, use the latin transliterations as written in the passport.
  • Otherwise, look up official transliteration rules from latin to local language and use those.
  • Don't try transliterating by yourself, or transliterating from the original names, it will cause issues.
  • If some system somewhere transliterates your names otherwise, complain loudly before they get committed anywhere.
  • If the local system forces you to have a "common" first name and your name doesn't fit, choose one that's as close as possible to the rules described above. If there is no close alternative, choose the one you like, but be prepared for issues down the road.
• If possible, leave all other names as blank, otherwise as -.
  • Don't try fitting a "middle name" from one system into another.
  • If possible, avoid fitting into the local system at all, e.g. don't make up a second family name even if the system calls for it. In my case, I didn't reuse the patronymic even when the local system had it as well, because my father's name is obviously not a local name so it would look really weird.
  • If asked, say you don't have any other names.

Of course, this is just what worked best in my specific situations, other countries may be different.

And also, I don't care at all about my legal name (all my friends call me by another name anyways) so I'm fine dropping a part of it, the goal here is to just make interactions with governments, banks, etc as smooth and easy as possible.

Both of the countries I'm from use or have used Chinese Characters but read them slightly differently. This way, I have the same name on both passports when written but different when spoken, for example Pak becomes Piao

I dont have a multiple passports but i come from an English speaking country and live in a S. Korea. Here your name for almost anything needs to reflect your official government documents or else you are in for a whole world of inconvenience.

My name here is . But here is the kicker apparently the government name system is case sensitive even if when docs are sent to me they appear all uppercase. It was through much trial and error that i discovered my middle name is not capitalized. This caused trouble opening bank accounts, importing things, getting a phone, etc

I'm a maultinational that lives in Germany.

I come from a country that at some point in time did use different alphabets other than latin (two, not one). Even though I have all offical documents written in latin alphabet and all are in my native language + English (especially made for easier international legibility), the average german (police officer/office clerk/ etc.) is still unable to find his way around it.

It also just so happens to be that my name doesn't contain a single vowel, so them trying to pronounce my name usually ends up being funny and lightens the spirits.

Hah, it's funny you ask this because I've been dealing with it lately.

US citizen living abroad at the moment. I have a middle name which is just, you know, vanity or whatever like it is for most people? My father's father's name but it doesn't have particular meaning to me and I don't necessarily like it. Still it came to be on my passport and I can't recall if I did it purposefully, or if I was just filling out information, or if it was required because it was on other documentation like my birth certificate.

However it happened, it's on the passport so now it's on all my official documentation here in the EU. It gets picked up by every system and I can't drop it, I have to keep propagating it because it needs to match the official documentation. It gets put in with my first name so now I'm just getting used to being "First Middle" "Last". This is made more unusual by the fact that the country I'm in does not have middle names. All my friends are like, "Oooh, exotic!" and it's like, no ... just silly American things ...

Generally though this doesn't affect anything whatsoever, it's just an oddity. I have simply never thought so much about my own middle name in my life and now it haunts me.

there's usually translation or transliteration for foreign names and we use them instead. sometimes. it's like nicknames, sometimes it catches.

Personally, it feels like sooner or later something is going to majorly fuck up, but it hasn’t yet.

In my country of origin, only your first name is your legal name. You can have middle names on your birth certificate but they don’t get put on any other ID document. I honestly discovered I had them when moving to a new country. So now I have an ID and passport as but my education papers and marriage certificate are . Somehow nobody yet called me a scam.

To avoid this problem, my kid has <2 First names> . That is legal in my country of origin and where they were born… but I later learned not in my partner’s country, so my kid has two passports, one with <2 First names> , one with .

Anecdote: a Mexican guy I knew went to the US and got a visa. Went back to Mexico then back to the US again with a new visa. Apparently, between the two visas the naming conventions changed, and his US legal name got scrambled. It was a mess to prove he was still the same person… and he never really understood why it happened.