I run a multilingual site. I have chosen to only permit characters a-z0-9 and - in URLs.

Now, what should I do with for example the russian part of the site? To give an example, the URL to the Russian currency page is currently:

http://www.example.com/ru/currency.html

Currency in russian is "Валюта". Transliterated to latin characters it would be "Valjuta".

So as I see it there are three options:

1. http://www.example.com/ru/currency.html
2. http://www.example.com/ru/Валюта.html
3. http://www.example.com/ru/valjuta.html

Personally, and having in mind that I am not Russian, I like number 3 the most. It keeps safe characters in the URL and it also keeps the meaning of the word. But who knows, maybe Russian people doesn't understand the meaning of the transliterated variant of the word? Do search engines understand it?

If there are any Russians in this forum I would love to hear from you. Non-Russian input is also welcome. ;-)

Thanks,
Jon

[NOTE: The weird codes are supposed to be russian / cyrillic letters. Webmasterworld doesn't seem to like them though...]