Russian Language Translation Services

 

An Accent on Accuracy

The highest quality translations, brisk turnaround schedules, competitive rates, and sharing of our knowledge are all requisites for ALT's success. The complete and accurate translation of your company's communications is vital to your success. That is why ALT is obsessed with providing the best translators for YOUR project. High-quality translations are the product of a highly talented and experienced translation team with expertise in your industry. ALT puts all the pieces together to make it happen.

Why choose us for English to Russian or  Russian to English Translation?

Advanced Language Translation’s Professional Russian translation services utilize only native speakers to ensure quality and precision translations for your target audience. The ability to translate from/into Russian requires not only a strong knowledge of the Russian language, but also it’s culture, as well as an understanding of the target audience, purpose of the source text and technical aspects of Cyrillic.

When doing business in Russian, professional, human translation is a must. Do not expect to close a business deal or impress your clients with spotty software translation. Only through human translation, edited and customized to your target audience, can your meaning be honestly conveyed and your audience not be offended.

We are proud of our excellent reputation for reliable and high quality Russian to English and English to Russian translation services. We have assembled teams of translators from around the world, with an array of skills and specialties and can custom fit the knowledge and strengths of our teams to your specific projects. To demonstrate our commitment to quality and our dedication to our clients, we offer free consultations and provide an industry leading 180-day warranty on translation!

We provide quick and easy custom quotes for your Russian translation and localization needs.

Need to get the “gist” of Russian?

Although professional translation is highly recommended for any business, legal or sincere correspondence in Russian, sometimes it’s necessary to use machine translation (via software or the internet) to get the gist of an e-mail or web page. By no means is machine translation an acceptable substitute for professional translation—the technology is not there yet. But it is great for quickly getting the general idea of an article, e-mail, or web site.

Interesting Facts about the Russian Language

One of the five top spoken languages in the world-–the larger four are Chinese, English, Hindi and Spanish-Russian belongs to the East Slavic group in Indo-European family. Languages closest to Russian are Ukrainian and Byelorussian.

Political causes have made Moscow’s dialect dominant throughout history. Modern literature is based on Moscow dialect. Modern dialectology distinguishes between northern, southern and central groups of dialects. The Central group is transitional between the other two. Nowadays, modern Russian speech is more of a mixture of literary norm with regional dialects, with a greater share of literary norm in cities and a greater dialectic element in smaller towns and villages.

As any other language, Russian was not developing in isolation. The strongest influence on Russian had Old Church Slavonic. A less important influence had Tatar. It gave Russian names to certain weapons, jewels, garments; borrowings from Latin and Polish were mainly for European things and ideas. During Peter the Great’s ruling, a lot of nautical terms were borrowed from Dutch and German. Catherine the Great times introduced a large number of borrowings from French, because French was the main language of aristocracy. These days, American English heavily affects some areas of technical terminology of modern Russian, such as computer terminology and telecommunications.

History of the Russian Language

If we go back in time as far as 3000-2000 BC, Proto-Slavic language branches off the powerful Indo-European language family tree. Proto-Slavic was not a written language and there is no record of it, but its existence can be theoretically proven by comparing all Slavic languages.

About 6th century AD, Proto-Slavic developed into three major languages that further developed into the following groups: Western Slavonic (Polish, Czech, Slovak are in this group), Southern Slavonic group (Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Old Church Slavonic and Serbo-Croatian) and Eastern Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian and Byelorussian). Slavonic did not have a written language until about the 9th century, when two brothers, Cyril and Methodius, of Constantinople origin, were sent to the Great Moravia (the largest and most powerful Slavonic state at that time) on a mission. Their mission was to create an alphabet for Slavonic and translate the bible and other important church literature from Greek into Slavonic.

The first books translated into Slavonic were the New Testament, the Book of Epistles and Psalms. Slowly, the language of church ceremonies changed to Old Church Slavonic. After Russia’s baptism in 988, Slavonic heritage laid the foundation of Russian Christian culture and spirituality, as well as highly influenced Russian language.

Written Language

The first alphabet was called Glagolitsa, which meant "word, speech". Some letters were borrowed from Greek, but the majority was invented by Cyril. As the primary goal for the alphabet creation was to translate church literature, the most important Christian symbols were used in some letters. Thus, the first letter had a shape of a cross. Glagolitsa was spread widely in Eastern Europe, but was not as popular in Ancient Russia.

After the death of Cyril and Mephodius at about the end of 9th century, his pupils created the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic alphabet was very similar to Glagolitsa as far as letter arrangement and sound meaning of the letters go, but the shape of letters was different. It was founded on Greek formal solemn writing. For the sounds missing in Greek, letters were taken from Glagolitsa.

The Cyrillic alphabet is used not only by the Russian language, but also by Ukrainian, Byelorussian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bulgarian and other languages. The Modern Russian alphabet consists of 33 letters: 10 vowels (а, я, о, ё, ы, и, е, у), 21 consonants (п, р, л, ф, в, д, ж, й, ц, к, н, г, щ, ш, з, ч, с, м, т, б, х), two signs without a designated sound (hard and soft signs – ъ, ь). The youngest and the most repressed letter is "ё". It was introduced to the Russian alphabet by princess E. P. Dashkova in November 29 ,1783, in the Petersburgh Academy of Sciences, to replace the letter combination "io". In modern print this letter is often ignored and the letter "е" is used in its place. However, this is still not a literary norm. To oppose the tendency of assimilation of the two letters, a large number of articles appeared in support of the letter "ё", the only umlaut in the Russian alphabet.

Russian Language Statistics

• About 167 million people speak Russian as their first language; for about 277 million  Russian is a second language.
• Russian is one of the official languages of the UN.
• The Russian-speaking population of the US is between 4 and 5.5 million people.
• Russia has a 99.6% literacy rate.

 

Translation and Localization Issues with Russian

Advanced Language Translation Inc has extensive experience with the in and outs of the Russian Language and we have a long and flawless record of success with complicated Russian translation projects. Here are some of the common issues with English to Russian translation that we have learned:

• Russian translation typically expands 40% in size from English.
• Not all applications support Russian text and great care must be taken when using 
  Russian in complex layouts. Some applications use different encodings, which 
  complicates data transfer from one application/OS to another. For example, it is not 
  possible to send/receive Russian emails or IMs using AOL software. Due to 
  encoding/font difficulties, simple operations, such as copying, pasting or printing, can 
  become a nightmare for a novice.
• There are certain hyphenation rules that have to be followed. Although in most cases 
  the rules are straightforward, some words can pose serious difficulties if your desktop 
  publishing/word processing department does not have the right expertise.
• For typesetting, a Cyrillic keyboard (onscreen or a separate keyboard) is necessary, 
  unless the person typesetting can do it using a blind method. Before starting to 
  typeset, Russian support should be activated. A Russian keyboard layout can be 
  viewed on the Microsoft website.
• Multilingual pages containing Russian, raise display problems in addition to input 
  problems. The combination of right encoding with the right fonts can do the trick on the 
  majority of the latest browsers, but on older versions it may be impossible.
• Dual numbering (singular and plural), three genders, six cases, three substantival 
  declensions are the few major grammatical peculiarities of Russian. The imperfect 
  aspect   and conditional complicate a simple at the first sight system of three tenses.
• Only one syllable in a word is stressed. Stress can shift from one syllable to another 
  in different derivatives of the same word.

 

Russian Language Vital Information

Speaking Population: 147 Million 
Where Spoken: Russian Federation, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and others.
Writing Systems: Cyrillic
Code Pages:   
      windows-1251, win-1251         Russian and C./E. European (Windows) or CP-1251 
      KOI8-R                                         Cyrillic (RFC 1489) (on the web) 
      ISO 8859-5                                  Cyrillic (Unix) 
      x-mac-cyrillic, mac-cyrillic         Cyrillic (Macintosh) 
Unicode Supported: Yes 
Common Phrases: (phonetic pronunciations in parentheses)
      Russian: Русский (rOOss key) 
      Hello: Здравствуйте! (zdrA stvooy tyeh) 
      Good-bye: До свидания! (daw svee dA nya) 
      Please: Пожалуйста (po ZAl sta) 
      Thank you: Спасибо (spah sEE bah) 
      English: Английский (ahn glEE skeey) 
      Yes: Да (dA) no: Нет (nyEt)