Russian Translation Services

Where Russian is spoken and where your translation is accepted

Russian is the official language of Russia and Belarus, has official status in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and is still widely used in Central Asia, the Caucasus, Moldova and the Baltic states. It has more than 140 million native speakers, is the most spoken Slavic language and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Large Russian-speaking communities live in Israel, Germany and the United States. The destination decides the type of translation.

Russian translation services: Cyrillic, names and Soviet records

Russian is one language from Moscow to Almaty, but its documents follow rules of their own: another alphabet, names in three parts and records issued by a country that no longer exists. A good translation handles each of them and keeps every detail of the original.

• Alphabet: Russian is written in Cyrillic, with 33 letters, and some of them look Latin but sound different, so Р is R, Н is N and В is V, and РОССИЯ reads Rossiya. A name can be transliterated in more than one way, so Юрий can be Yuri, Yuriy or Iouri.
• Names: a full name has a first name, a patronymic made from the father’s first name and a surname, as in Ivan Petrovich Ivanov, son of Pyotr. Women’s surnames take a feminine ending, so his sister is Anna Petrovna Ivanova. The translation follows the spelling of the international passport and keeps it the same in every document.
• Dates and numbers: dates are written day, month and year with periods, so 03.10.2026 is October 3, 2026, often followed by г., short for year. Decimals use a comma and thousands a space, so 1 500,00 is one thousand five hundred.
• Documents: civil records come from the registry office (ZAGS, ЗАГС), such as the birth certificate (svidetelstvo o rozhdenii) and the marriage certificate. Russia has an internal passport and an international passport (zagranpasport), and a diploma comes with a supplement listing subjects and grades (prilozhenie k diplomu). The translation reproduces every stamp, seal and note.
• Soviet and older records: documents issued between 1922 and 1991 in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union were usually written in Russian, sometimes beside the local language, and records from before 1918 use the old spelling, with letters such as ѣ and і that are no longer used. The translation reads each one as it was written.