@Vladmir Ladynev, @Todd Richmond
I think that the solution provided by Vladimir is very good for porting all naming strategies across however a physical naming strategy needs to be set as well as the implicit naming strategy in our case which extends the PhysicalNamingStrategyStandardImpl and overwrites the toPhysicalTableName and toPhysicalColumnName methods with the hibernate 4 method addUnderscores and returning the identifier as quoted set to true.
I would ask why the old interface methods couldn't be delegated to the new interface methods - the naming convention isn't the same so it's quite hard for a non hibernate guru to decipher.