Как правильно будет транскрибировать английское имя Nathan на русский? В голове пока что есть три варианта: Нейтан, Нэйтан и Нэтан. При аргументировании правильного на ваш взгляд варианта транскрипции, пожалуйста, приведите источники.
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I would say this depends on the nature of the text. If it's contemporary fiction, it's Нэйтан; if it's anything written before WWII Натан would be appropriate; if it's a scientific text you may end up providing the original name and suggested stress with Cyrillic transliteration.– alamarCommented Mar 5 at 10:26
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The vast majority of foreign personal names are transcribed rather than translated into Russian. Among exceptions are nicknames and names from cultures that use unique, meaningful phrases to name people, such as the Native American names Sitting Bull (Сидящий Бык), Crazy Horse (Неистовый Конь), etc.
Some languages (Japanese, Korean, Icelandic and a number of others, mostly unicentric languages) have pretty strict and well-defined transcription and/or transliteration systems, using which you can more or less mechanically apply the rules and get a Russian rendition of almost any name used in that language. English, unfortunately, is not one of them.
There exist a number of guides which define some practical approaches to transcribing English names into Russian. They usually have a table containing the most-used English names and their Russian transcriptions.
One of them is Иностранные имена и названия в русском тексте by Gilyarevsky, Starostin et al., which suggests transcribing "Nathan" as Ната́н (3rd edition, Moscow, 1985, p. 100)
It should be noted that the authors of this guide tried to design a system and not just a bunch of ad-hoc rules.
There are many driving forces that act on any transcription system: consistency, tradition, resemblance to the original pronunciation, resemblance to the original spelling, etymological connections, Russian euphony, and so on, and so forth.
English is a pluricentric language with an extremely complex orthography, lots of regional variations in pronunciation and spelling, and a long history of being transcribed and transliterated into Russian. In the case of English, these forces sometimes pull too hard in too many different directions.
So the answer to almost any question "why doesn't the transcription of name A adequately reflect feature B" will be "because the designers of the system decided it that way, hopefully because they considered some other features C, D and E more important than B".
Also note that, as always, a guide is just a guide — one of many, to boot. If you're writing something that's not constrained by the decisions of a school board, or a publishing house style committee, or anything like that, you're free to use any spelling you see fit for your own, particular text.
