Hi,
The person's real name is the one given by his mother.
Translations in other languages are subjective. For instance,
François may be translated Francis, Frank or even Frances. Each
translation is right. Nonetheless, medias usually stick to one
translated form, which is still subjectively chosen.
So, the source for the proper translation is in newspapers (active persons) and history books. There's also less known people, people without international cover, which name has never been translated. I think offering the multiple main translated form is fair.
So, how can Wiki search automatically in the world's online
newspapers, and digitized books, counting occurences to see the
most popular form?
https://www.linguee.com/english-french/search?source=auto&query=mariya+yakovlevna+serova
And... how pronunciation and phonetic rules will sometimes play a part in how humans transliterate and put effort into translations.
"Hmm, well it sounds like you are saying Z in English to my American English ears... so I'll transcribe it as such to make it sensical for English readers" etc. etc.
Where there has been work on phonetic mappings over the years, such as Metaphone3, what we borrowed and used in OpenRefine
https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/blob/master/main/src/com/google/refine/clustering/binning/Metaphone3.java
Many, many rules in places all over the internet to be had and eventually encoded into functions or maps.
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