Pronto can handle the translation of your news release or document destined for any one the 15 countries where Russian is the lingua franca!
Russian (русский язык) is an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. It is still widely used in several countries of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Russian was the de facto language of the Soviet Union until its dissolution on 26 December 1991. The language remains as a lingua franca, with an official capacity and in common usage in public life in all of the countries that made up the former USSR.
Due to the diaspora from the former Soviet bloc, large communities of Russian speakers exist in other countries, most notably, Israel and Mongolia.
Russian is the seventh-most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language with the most number of native speakers in Europe and the one with the largest geographical spread across the Eurasian landmass. Some 118 million in Russia claim the language as their mother tongue (85.7% of all speakers in the country), 14 million in Ukraine (29.6%), 6 million in Belarus (70.2%), 3.8 million in Kazakhstan (21.2%), 2.2 million in Germany (2.8%) and 1.2 million in Israel (15.0%) as well as approximately 6 million in the rest of the world, adding up to some 150 million native speakers worldwide.
Russian is the eighth-most spoken language in the world by total number of speakers, native and non-native. The language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. After English, Russian is the second-most used language on the Internet.
Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages alongside Belorusan, Rusyn (a.k.a. Ruthenian) and Ukrainian, and part of the larger Balto-Slavic branch. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian.
Some languages, such as English and Japanese, borrow freely from others, transliterating the foreign words into their own phonetic system, whereas others, most notably Chinese, will translate a new concept into their language by stringing together certain native terms to express the new idea. The Russian language was a happy borrower, developed from its Slavic base with the continuous influx of vocabulary from various European and Middle Eastern languages.
Russia’s geographical location, trade dating back hundreds of years with other countries, and several Renaissance waves starting in the 17th century all conspired to enrich the language well beyond its Slavic roots. Though the base of the language is unmistakably Slavic, many alphabetical, grammatical, and vocabulary forms are distinctly foreign.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the flood of loanwords evolved, mostly from English but from other European languages as well. These loanwords enabled the changing society to handle a rising tide of new financial, technical, economic and social concepts has proven to be a major challenge for Russian translators.
Some countries, most notably French-speaking Canada and France, have drafted and implemented laws and regulations to preserve the sanctity of the language, as they saw it, with questionable success. Russia, on the other hand, made no effort to “regulate” the language. Many of the borrowed terms have perfectly good Russian equivalents. Yet, the Russian population appears to have happily accepted the influx of new English terms. Consequently, translators need to assess the context of a document to know whether a native Russian term or the loanword is a better fit.
Our translators keep abreast of evolving linguistic usage and can choose the appropriate term. Clients can rest assured that their translated text most accurately matches the expectations of the target audience — whether the message is directly to a particular industry, market, demographic segment or the public in general.