That’s the English translation of the Cyrillic letters serial number prefix. The ATF required the importers to butcher these historical rifles with this nonsense.

 

It has an CAI import mark way up near the muzzle, which is less offensive than the giant billboard on the side of some of my Mosins. I'm not sure that's what the four letters KHYE are above the serial number and below the "1939г". I would assume this was something the Finns did, as the "KHYE" doesn't look to be the Cyrillic font which would look like "КНУЕ"

 

My wife's m38 has the "translation" stamps as well on it. Confused me a good but when I saw them, I made a thread about them to figure out the answer

 

The "SA" stamp looks suspiciously fresh. The fakers are out there.

SA stamp punch K98 P08 | eBay

Condition as pictured - very good. A-7,5 x 6 mm. F- 3,5 2,6 mm.

www.ebay.com

 

It has a spliced stock, someone went through a lot of trouble to fake it...

 

In the Cyrillic alphabet what looks like an "X" and and "E" transliterated to "Kh" and "Ye". BATFE do not allow non-Latin letters in a serial number.

 

Century stamped that on the rifle here in the US.
When it was imported and then sold it needed Latin letters to be entered into a bound book.

 

For sure there are fakers out there (they usually do a half-assed job and their creations are pretty obviously wrong) but I doubt anyone is bothering to fake a Finn capture 1939 Izhevsk 91/30. It's not like this is an scarce rifle.

 

Thank you for all the replies. Good information. I was totally thrown off by this and thankfully had never seen it before on any of my Mosins.

 

This “every SA mark is fake” mentality is getting really old.

 

Indeed.