Companies usually approach English to Russian translation as a procurement question. How many words, how fast, how much. The interesting problems are somewhere else entirely. Russian does things to a text that English never prepares you for, and most of the trouble that shows up later, in broken layouts, wooden marketing copy and contracts that read oddly to a Moscow lawyer, was decided long before anyone opened a translation tool.

Your text is about to get longer

Expect roughly ten to twenty percent more characters than the English source, sometimes more in technical writing. Compound English nouns unpack into phrases, and Russian rarely tolerates the clipped headline style that fits neatly into a button or a table cell. Anyone who has watched a navigation menu wrap onto two lines after a Russian release knows the feeling.

The fix is not to squeeze the translation. It is to design for expansion early: flexible containers, no fixed-width buttons, no text baked into images, and a review pass in the real interface rather than in a spreadsheet. Print work has the same problem in a different shape, where two extra lines per page turn a twelve page brochure into a fourteen page one.

Six cases, and why fragments cannot be reused

Because Russian is a heavily inflected language, nouns and adjectives change their endings according to their role in the sentence. That single fact breaks a habit English developers and copywriters have learned to rely on, which is assembling sentences out of reusable fragments. The phrase that works after a verb will be wrong after a preposition, and the plural form depends on the actual number in a way English speakers find genuinely strange, since one, two and five each take a different ending.

Practically, that means dynamic strings need to be handed over whole, with their variables and enough context to see how they are used. Give a translator a string that reads simply Save and you will get a guess. Tell them it labels a button in a settings dialog and you will get the right word.

The formality decision nobody briefs

Russian distinguishes between a formal and an informal form of address, and choosing between them is a brand decision rather than a linguistic one. Consumer apps aimed at younger users often go informal. Banking, medical and industrial clients almost never do. What matters most is that the choice is made once, written into a style guide, and applied consistently, because a product that switches register between screens sounds like it was written by several people who had never met, which of course it was.

Names, addresses and the transliteration trap

Turning names between scripts is not a solved problem. There are several competing romanization standards, and passports, bank records and academic transcripts frequently disagree with one another for the same person. The same difficulty runs in the other direction across the whole Cyrillic alphabet, where one name can reach an English document in four defensible spellings.

For anything official, the rule is simple and worth repeating to clients: match the spelling that already exists on the person's identity documents, even when a different system would be more elegant. Elegance does not open bank accounts.

Legal and technical Russian is a different register

Russian contract language is denser and more formulaic than its English equivalent, and a literal rendering reads as amateur to anyone who works with it daily. Technical documentation follows its own long-standing conventions for units, tolerances and standards references, many inherited from national standards that predate the current commercial environment. Translators who work in these fields keep the conventions and adjust the sentence structure. Translators who do not produce something that is accurate word by word and unusable as a document.

Where machine translation stops being enough

Neural engines handle English to Russian reasonably well for gist, internal email and support tickets where speed matters more than polish. They are much weaker on marketing copy, where the output is grammatical and completely flat, and on anything with legal consequence, where a plausible wrong word is more dangerous than an obvious one. The sensible pattern most teams land on is machine output plus a professional editor for medium-stakes content, and human translation from the start for anything that carries a signature or a brand promise.

It is worth remembering why this is a commercial question and not a linguistic one. Research on buying behaviour has consistently shown that most consumers will not buy in a language they do not read comfortably, and half-translated Russian reads as a signal that the seller is not serious about the market.

What to hand over, and what to ask for back

Send the source files rather than a PDF, a glossary if one exists, screenshots or drawings, and a named person who can answer questions. Say who the reader is and which market you are addressing, since Russian is used well beyond Russia and regional expectations differ. Ask for a second pair of eyes on anything published, and ask for the glossary back at the end so the next project starts where this one finished.

None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary discipline of professional Russian translation services, and it is the difference between a text that merely exists in Russian and one that a Russian reader trusts.