In English we have eleven vowel sounds represented by  various combinations of five vowel orthographic symbols.

Two of those sounds are:

[i] & [ɪ]

That’s IPA. They’re equivalent to the “hard” i in “bite” and the “soft” i in “bit.”

But Russian doesn’t phonemically make that distinction.

Conceptually, those two sounds function together as allomorphs for a single phonemic sound. What that means is that [i] & [ɪ] in Russian are roughly similar to the -s plural form in English which is -s in “cats,” -z in “dogs,” and -es in “boxes.” In our minds (our English phonological system), they’re the same, even though physically speaking they are completely different sounds.

So what happens when Russians translate certain phrases from Russian to English and put them on street signs?

Well,

…something like this:

Green who?

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