Is there software that will translate "Library of Congress" form of writing Russian. I receive text messages on my phone and promt does not translate except for Cyrillic. I also intend to buy software that does not require internet connection. Does anyone have experience on this subject?
Rodan, are you talking about russian words represented in latin chars? If so converting these to cyrillic is fairly simple (theres a standard mapping table see below) and there are number of online or downloadable apps you can use off line. Most are free since its fairly simple.
But I don't know of any that convert latin russian direct to english (although I haven't really looked, it would be interesting if anyone as found one). So it maybe a two step process to transliterate latin to cyrillic and then russian cyrillic to english using 2 different applications. Of course because its a two step process theres more room for error and I'd imagine a lot of words don't get translated especially for informal writing that that you may get as text messages on a phone.
Transliteration as defined by the Russian ministry of interior.
1. Convert all to uppercase
2. Convert diphthongs: КС, АЙ, ЫЙ, ЕЙ, ЭЙ, ИЙ, ЫЙ, ОЙ, ЯЙ, УЙ, ЬЕ, ИЯ, ЬЯ --> X, AY, Y, EY, EY, Y, YUY, OY, YAY, UY, YE, IA, IA
3. Convert remaining chars: А, Б, В, Г, Д, Е, Ё, Ж, З, И, Й, К, Л, М, Н, О, П, Р, С, Т, У, Ф, Х, Ц, Ч, Ш, Щ, Ь, Ы, Ъ, Э, Ю, Я --> A, B, V, G, D, E, YO, ZH, Z, I, Y, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, F, KH, TS, CH, SH, SHCH, ', Y, '', E, YU, YA
4. Latin chars, special chars, white spaces, formatting remains unchanged.
Unfortunately, the way Russian-speakers transliterate into latin characters probably doesn't exactly match any of the standards. It would be really interesting if there is software to do what you are looking for: to work well, it would need to 'sound out' the letters (guess the phonetic values), and then use a phonetic dictionary of Russian.
If your messages aren't too many (and too personal), pm to me and I will do my best.
Unless a phonetic translator is out there, your simplest option would be to get a phone that does Cyrillic, or load Cyrillic onto your phone (I did this with my Razr, which originally only could had latin and Chinese characters).
If you begin to study Russian, with a focus on pronunciation, you can get good at figuring the Cyrillic values within a few months.