Translating into Russian, and in particular translating websites intoRussian, presents its fair share of technical problems. Like other Slavic languages, Russian uses two different declensions for a noun following a number, the singular genitive and the plural genitive, depending on whether the number is below 5 or not. For example “2 young girls” is translated as 2 девушки, but “5 young girls” is translated as 5 девушек. The HTML code of a web page cannot therefore be calculated using the French code, where only two forms, the singular and plural, are taken into account. However, it is possible to get round this problem by changing the layout in order to use the Russian plural, for example девушки: 2 and девушки: 5. Another technical challenge familiar to programmers is the coding of Cyrillic characters. Ideally, the pages must be coded so that it is possible to display both Latin and Cyrillic characters, for example in UTF-8.
First European language in terms of demographics Russian is a Slavic language written using the Cyrillic alphabet. It has the reputation of being difficult but its structure is relatively close to Latin and Germanic languages. The Russian and CIS markets are booming but they have the reputation of staying apart from the others, even though they are located at the gateway to Europe. The Russian economy is essentially based on the sale of raw materials (gas and oil) and heavy industry. Foreign products, tourism in Europe and beyond have an excellent reputation.
Contact us if you would like an estimate of the cost of translating your website in Russian.
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