Ukrainian Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Ukrainian Language

The Ukrainian language is an Eastern Slavic language, and part of the Indo-European language family.

Ukrainian is the second most spoken Slavic language and there are 37 million speakers in Ukraine. Most of them are native speakers. The Ukrainian language is written with Cyrillic letters.

The first theory of the origin of Ukrainian language was suggested in Imperial Russia in the middle of the 18th century by Mikhail Lomonosov. This theory posits the existence of a common language spoken by all East Slavic people in the time of the Rus'. According to Lomonosov, the differences that subsequently developed between Great Russian and Ukrainian (which he referred to as Little Russian) could be explained by the influence of the Polish and Slovak languages on Ukrainian and the influence of Uralic languages on Russian from the 13th to the 17th centuries.

Another point of view developed during the 19th and 20th centuries by linguists of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Like Lomonosov, they assumed the existence of a common language spoken by East Slavs in the past. But unlike Lomonosov's hypothesis, this theory does not view "Polonization" or any other external influence as the main driving force that led to the formation of three different languages (Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian) from the common Old East Slavic language. This general point of view is the most accepted amongst academics worldwide, particularly outside Ukraine. The supporters of this theory disagree, however, about the time when the different languages were formed.

Soviet scholars set the divergence between Ukrainian and Russian only at later time periods (14th through 16th centuries). According to this view, Old East Slavic diverged into Belarusian and Ukrainian to the west (collectively, the Ruthenian language of the 15th to 18th centuries), and Old Russian to the north-east, after the political boundaries of the Kievan Rus' were redrawn in the 14th century. During the time of the incorporation of Ruthenia (Ukraine and Belarus) into the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ukrainian and Belarusian diverged into identifiably separate languages.

Ukrainian Translation Expertise

Ukrainian has seven grammatical cases (including the vocative, which is actively used unlike in Russian) and a complex aspectual verb system distinguishing perfective and imperfective actions. The language underwent significant orthographic reform and de-Russification efforts, and translators must be aware of current Ukrainian standard forms rather than older Soviet-era variants. Legal and civil documents use highly formalised phrasing with specific administrative terminology that may differ from conversational Ukrainian.

Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet with 33 letters, including characters not found in Russian such as ґ, є, і, and ї. The soft sign (ь) and apostrophe play important grammatical roles. Transliteration into Latin script follows the Ukrainian national standard (adopted 2010), which differs from Russian transliteration conventions.

Common Ukrainian Documents

Commonly translated documents include свідоцтво про народження (birth certificates), свідоцтво про шлюб (marriage certificates), довідка про несудимість (criminal record extracts), and academic diplomas from Ukrainian universities and technical institutes.

NAATI offers certification for Ukrainian translators, and demand for certified Ukrainian translation has increased substantially since 2022 due to humanitarian visa programs. NAATI-certified Ukrainian translations are accepted by the Department of Home Affairs for all visa categories.

About the Ukrainian Language

Ukrainian was voted the second most melodious language in the world at a 1934 linguistics competition in Paris, after Italian. The Ukrainian alphabet has 33 letters including the unique ґ, which was banned during the Soviet era and only officially reinstated in 1990. Ukrainian uses a musical stress system where the stress position can shift between different forms of the same word, and misplacing it can change meaning entirely.