didobas:Quite possibly, it's not her parents' kre8tivity, but the immigration bureau's attempt to phonetically transcribe a name written in Cyrillic alphabet. This from a lurker whose 4letter name, a Russian version of Julia, is spelled Yuliya : Happens all the time.
Interesting. And it's very possible - we have a lot of foreign students. But if they can't keep the traditional spelling anyway and it's going to sound like Victoria, why in the world wouldn't they use a more traditional spelling, or at least not throw in extra letters?
Also, the -iya makes a lot more sense to me than the -yia.