The importance of Russian translation
Russian is an Indo-European language of the East Slavic branch. It is the official language in Russia and other countries such as Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan. It is also spoken in Ukraine, and in some areas of Estonia, Latvia and Georgia. Its extension is due to the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, which consisted of 15 republics.
With 278 million speakers, it is the fourth most spoken language in the world. It is also one of the six official languages of the UN, along with Arabic and English, among others. It is worth noting that Russian is known as the language of space, so Russian translation is likely to be required in this field. This is because knowing Russian is one of the requirements to join NASA.
Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, that is, it can be written in uppercase, lowercase or Cyrillic cursive. This Cyrillic alphabet dates back to the 10th century, and was created by a Byzantine missionary. It is based on the Greek alphabet, although it includes elements of the Glagolitic alphabet (the oldest alphabet of Slavic origin).
Language features to bear in mind during Russian translation
The Russian language consists of 5 vowel sounds and 37 consonant sounds. In addition, words are almost always pronounced as they are written. Its grammar is said to be very complex. It uses three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter. Therefore, it has 6 declensions for nouns, pronouns, demonstrative adjectives and ordinal numbers. In fact, they are usually declined according to case, gender and number. It does not use articles and the order of words in a sentence can vary to emphasise certain ideas.
