? about Russian speaking English. Sister is the word.

I believe it's normal, when you're dropping foreign words into English-language fiction, that when they're from a language that does not use the Roman alphabet you should use the transliterated form, not whatever the original non-Roman alphabet form is. But when you're dealing with a real word from a real language you should use the correct transliteration, not your own phonetic slap-up. Just as it's no longer really acceptable to misspell ordinary words to indicate a character's ignorance or background, you shouldn't use strange transliterations to indicate they don't know the other language. POV has nothing to do with it. You're the writer - you filter everything. It's fine to include a foreign word or two where it fits, but spell it right!

Being particularly fond of the Cyrillic alphabet I would love to see the Russian spelling. I disagree with benbenberi about the POV, though. If someone is hearing another person say Sestra and the hearer of the word is English-speaking then they wouldn't be imagining a word spelled with the Russian alphabet but rather their own. The same way when people talk about Vladimir Putin, being American I visualize his name spelled in the English format but if I were Russian I'd be visualizing it as Влади́мир Пу́тин. If the story is written in omniscient POV or if the scene is written in the POV of the Russian then for sure I'd stick with the Cyrillic spelling. If the scene is written through the eyes of an English speaker who isn't familiar or fluent with the Russian language then I'd keep it phonetic otherwise you really are going out of POV, and it's clear the author is butting into the story to show off their knowledge of foreign languages or trying to make the dialog look pretty.

Quentin Nokov said:

if I were Russian I'd be visualizing it as Влади́мир Пу́тин. If the story is written in omniscient POV or if the scene is written in the POV of the Russian then for sure I'd stick with the Cyrillic spelling.

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For an English reader, that would be unintelligible. Using a transliteration would be far more standard.

At any rate, I think the OP was asking whether to use the transliteration (sestra) or the standard English spelling (sister).

Quentin Nokov said:

If the story is written in omniscient POV or if the scene is written in the POV of the Russian then for sure I'd stick with the Cyrillic spelling.

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Do this if your goal is to drive away all the non-Russian readers, or at the least to hide from them whatever is being said in the dialog that will look like gibberish to them. (Whether it's a single word or entire stanzas of Pushkin, if it's presented in the original Cyrillic form within an English-language text it might as well be Elvish.)

Quentin Nokov said:

If the scene is written through the eyes of an English speaker who isn't familiar or fluent with the Russian language then I'd keep it phonetic otherwise you really are going out of POV, and it's clear the author is butting into the story to show off their knowledge of foreign languages or trying to make the dialog look pretty.

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Unless you're transcribing all the um... uh... er... repetition, digression, & rambling of actual speech as it is spoken in the wild, the author is already totally butting into the story to provide a cleaned-up, comprehensible, edited version of the dialog. Normalizing the spelling is just another part of this. The goal is to make something readable to the audience, not to replicate natural speech or actual thought processes (take a look at some transcripts of speech - it's pretty hard to read, & you wouldn't want to meet it in a story!) The writer absolutely has the duty to make their dialog accessible to the reader, unless the goal of their writing is to mess with the reader, & that includes spelling things the way the writer knows they are supposed to be spelled.

A foreign word in Latin transliteration is all right. It was used in Russian books and Greek books and Chinese books... Nobody uses the local alphabet when writing the novel in another language.

DarienW said:

does that mean the POV would spell it how it sounds, as he doesn't know Russian?

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I'd say yes (spell as the word sounds). I've also seen that been done in published books.

Another route you could take for an ESL speaker is something like, "My... what is your word for it... girl-brother is missing".