Russian is one of the top spoken languages in the world. It belongs to the East Slavic group in Indo-European family and is the native language of an estimated 167 million people. Russian is written using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, consisting of 33 letters. According to the Unicode Standard, the average word length in Russian is 6.36 letters versus 5.1 letters in English, which has some major implications when translating from English to Russian. English to Russian translations typically result in expanding the amount of copy by 20-30 percent compared to the English source document. The length issue is made worse due to the nature of the Cyrillic script, which has no “narrow” characters (i.e. "i" or "l"). This can pose a challenge when translating brochures, packaging, labels, and other materials that might be space limiting.

In addition to understanding the industry and language nuances, qualified translators need to have expertise in methods for adapting to a need for more copy in the same amount of space. Often a font size will be reduced, but certain industries regulate that, as well. For example, the pharmaceutical industry varies from country to country on the minimum font size allowable on prescription labels. Therefore, it is important to work with a translation firm familiar with label regulatory requirements.

For more information about translating materials, medical regulatory consulting, or localizing your website for Russian speakers, contact us.

SOURCES:
Future Pharmaceutical magazine
http://blogamundo.net/lab/wordlengths/ http://www.unicode.org/