Russian Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Russian Language

Russian is the official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories throughout Eurasia (particularity in Eastern Europe, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia). It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Latvia, Moldova, Ukraine and to a lesser extent, the other post-Soviet states.

Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages.

Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. Almost every consonant has a hard or a soft counterpart, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words, for example замо́к (zamók, meaning a lock) and за́мок (zámok, meaning a castle), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or names.

Russian is a rather homogeneous language, in terms of dialectal variation, due to the early political centralization under Moscow's rule, compulsory education, mass migration from rural to urban areas in the 20th century, as well as other factors. The standard language is used in written and spoken form almost everywhere in the country, from Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburg in the West to Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky in the East, the enormous distance between notwithstanding.

Russian Translation Expertise

Russian has six grammatical cases, three genders, and an aspectual verb system where nearly every verb exists in perfective and imperfective pairs, each demanding different translation choices in English. Word order is flexible because meaning is carried by inflectional endings, but emphasis and nuance shift with position — a subtlety that must be preserved in legal translation. Russian official documents use a heavily formalised register with standardised bureaucratic phrasing that has remained largely unchanged since the Soviet era.

Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 33 letters, including two modifier letters — the hard sign (tvyordyy znak) and soft sign (myagkiy znak) — that affect pronunciation but have no sound of their own. Transliteration of Russian names into Latin script is inconsistent across different national standards (GOST, BGN/PCGN, ISO), and passports may use a different romanisation than academic or library conventions.

Common Russian Documents

Russian documents commonly requiring translation include the svidetel'stvo o rozhdenii (birth certificate), svidetel'stvo o brake (marriage certificate), diplom o vysshem obrazovanii (higher education diploma), and spravka o nesudimosti (criminal record certificate).

NAATI certification for Russian is well established with a solid pool of certified translators in all major Australian cities. Russian is among the more commonly requested NAATI language pairs, supported by decades of Russian-speaking migration from the former Soviet Union.

About the Russian Language

Russian has two separate verbs for almost every action — one for a completed action and one for an ongoing action (perfective and imperfective aspect) — meaning the Russian verb vocabulary is effectively double the size of most European languages. The Russian alphabet includes two "silent" letters that make no sound of their own: the hard sign (ъ) and soft sign (ь), which modify the pronunciation of adjacent consonants. Russian was the first language broadcast from space — Yuri Gagarin's famous "Poyekhali!" ("Let's go!") in 1961 — and it remains one of the two official working languages of the International Space Station, where all astronauts are required to learn it.