An ever-alert reader notes that on the B92 website in Serbia I am described as Carls Kroford.

Huh?

On Charles, the cyrillic alphabet has its own separate letters for our ch sound, one for a 'hard' ch and one for a 'soft' ch: very roughly the difference between choose-day and Tuesday. Similarly Polish: a hard ch is written cz.

When Serbs transcribe that into Latin script, the usual formula is to denote a hard ch with a little accent on top: Č (ч in lower case cyrillic). A soft ch appears like this: Ć (ћ in lower case cyrillic)

To make it all the more tricky for foreigners, whereas many Serb names end with a soft ch (Milošević), some end with a straight c which has the same sound as the ts in cats (Kragujevac).

B92 uses a simplified Latin script for its English language version which omits the accents and gets rid of letters not sounded in English anyway. So Čarls becomes Carls.

As for Kroford, Serbian does not really have the long sound of the English word 'awe', so it improvises with the next best thing, namely an o as in 'otter'.

Plus being a sensible phonetic language Serbian writes as it sounds where possible, so the hard C beginning Crawford is invariably written with a K (as in kapetan, a Serbian version of captain).

So Crawford becomes Kroford.

Simple.