Languages
Russian translation for public agencies.
Already required by several California state agencies, and approaching San Francisco's ordinance threshold. The pitfalls here are grammatical and they concentrate in form labels.
- Русский
- Independent, in the pair
- Returned same business day
Decisions
What we settle before the first sentence.
These are choices, not defaults. Each one is agreed at intake, recorded, and carried into the next document so a set stays consistent with itself.
Formal address, held consistently
Vy throughout, capitalized in direct written address to an individual as Russian official correspondence conventionally does. The register is that of a government office writing to a resident: complete sentences, no contractions of tone, and none of the softened marketing warmth that reads as insincere in this pair.
Terminology anchored to the English program name
California program and benefit names have no settled Russian equivalents, and readers will have to match what they are reading to an English form, envelope, or phone menu. We translate the description and keep the program name in English alongside it on first reference.
Transliteration rules set once
Street names, agency names, and personal names need a consistent transliteration scheme across a document set. We fix one and apply it, rather than deciding case by case.
Hazards
Where this pair breaks.
Most errors in a translated public document are production failures that survive approval and show up in the file your reader receives.
Case agreement in form field labels
This is the characteristic failure in Russian public forms. Russian nouns and adjectives inflect for case, so a label that is correct standing alone is wrong once it is a fragment inside a sentence, a table header above a value, or a string concatenated by software. Labels translated as an isolated list (the way they usually arrive, in a spreadsheet column) come back grammatically detached from the form they sit in. We ask for the labels in context, or we ask what the surrounding sentence is, before translating them.
Concatenated and templated strings
Any string your system assembles at runtime, such as a sentence with a number or a name dropped into the middle, needs the whole pattern translated rather than the pieces. Russian number agreement alone has three forms depending on the numeral, which no amount of care applied to the fragments can fix.
Text expansion and long words
Russian runs longer than English and produces individual words long enough to break a narrow column or a fixed-width button. Hyphenation rules differ from English, so a template that hyphenates automatically will break words in the wrong places.
California context
Why California agencies buy this pair.
Russian is already a required language for several California state agencies operating under the Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act (Gov. Code §7290 et seq.), and it is among the languages approaching San Francisco's Language Access Ordinance threshold rather than one already over it. Departments that plan document sets a year ahead tend to want it costed before it is compulsory.
Departments adding Russian to an existing Spanish and Chinese set usually need it on the same date as the rest. It is priced and dated on its own line, so a date that holds for one and not another is visible in the quote rather than at delivery.
Descriptions of the law here are general. What a particular department owes in a particular case is the department’s determination, not ours.
The decisions above are what this pair asks you to settle. What it does not change is the schedule: the date in your quote is one we have already staffed, and if it will not hold, the quote says so before you order.
- Standard
- Priority
- Scheduled
Intake
What we will ask you.
These are the Russian questions specifically. Answering them in your first email shortens the quote and removes the round trip.
Are any of these strings form field labels or interface text? Send them with their surrounding context.
Does anything get assembled at runtime: a name, a date, or a count dropped into a sentence?
Is there an existing Russian version from your agency or a state program to match?
Send us a Russian document.
Attach the file, tell us the deadline, and answer whichever of the questions above apply. A written quote comes back same business day.