Quote Originally Posted by scotcher
It's really very simple. Say your name out loud, then look at the cyrillic alphabet, and pick the letters that allow you to make the sound closest to what you just said. How you happen to spell your name with latin letters is totally irrelevant.
And that's exactly why I always try to insist on the term transcription, not transliteration, although no one ever takes any notice. They are completely different things.

And it's not actually as quite simple as that, it's a matter of custom as much as anything else, in these cases where no Cyrillic letter is quite right. You can buck the trend, but it seems a bit pointless.
This problem arises because there is no currently available objective measure of phoneme closeness (or is there?). Maybe if you could decide how many degrees of freedom there are in human sound production, you could take the square root of the sum of the squared deviations across all the dimensions .. umm .. see what I mean?
And then with accents it just gets more complicated, although for some reason I've never understood, there's much less deviation in Russian vowel sounds than in English ones.