Tips to translate your English book into Russian
Challenging Role
Being an author or a publisher is really a very challenging role requiring decision making and responsibilities taken. Every author wants to have his or her product spread to more people. That is why they use many services and opportunities both online and offline. They want to be heard and understood, to share their knowledge, to be recognized and accepted. In this post we will speak about how to translate your English book into Russian.
When it comes to sharing their knowledge with other nations speaking different languages, the author or publisher is faced with the challenge of translating materials into the target language and this very often takes too much time and efforts.
Why choose Russian or Ukrainian?
Russian language is spoken by 260 million people. Linguistically it’s very different from English. Russian alphabet is Cyrillic while English one is Latin, Russian has fewer tenses and the word order rules are not so strict as in English. Some sounds are really complex for English-speaking population that can’t tell the difference between ш and щ sound and find it hard to articulate soft sounds. Russian grammar is rather complex and usually there are exception to almost every other rule. In Russian, adjectives, nouns, pronouns and some other parts of speech change their endings depending on singular or plural form (it happens only to nouns in English), gender, cases and many other factors. In fact, this is really complicated for English-speaking people.
Where to begin?
Now that you have seen that Russian (and Ukrainian being of the same origin) is rather a complicated language, there are several rules to follow when it comes to Russian or Ukrainian translation of any material:
- The translation MUST be done by a native person.
- This native person MUST be translator.
And we don’t speak here about the machine translation. Machines haven’t learned to translate emotions, different shades of mood. Machine translation is ok only when you want to get the gist of what the text is about. Speaking about literature, machines will hardly ever (at least in the following decade) substitute a human translator.
How to find a good translator?
Try Google? Really? No! There is a better option. To search for a translator on a site being a whole world for any translator. Of course, we are talking here about Proz.com site. I can’t imagine being a professional translator and not being registered on Proz. Most translators working worldwide are here and you don’t have to look further. This is the hub, the centre of technology and education, networking and experience. All of our translators are also registered there and anyone can look up our profiles.
But hey, we were talking about a book translation into Russian.
In fact, there is no additional information you need to get this task done. You can search the Proz site for translation of different topics, languages, locations and use many other settings or you can just post a job and choose from the quotes sent to you by available translators.
Our Team is Ready to Translate Your Book
You can also go no further than our Catalex Team. Here is the list of domains we specialize in. We are sure you will get what you want with our services.
There are many processes behind translating a book. For example, you should build a team for this very book. The best option, though, is to have one translator to do the job, it’s obvious. But you can do this only if your book is not very big or if you’ve got much time (several months, in fact).
After setting up a team we get down to building a glossary (with the author’s help, of course) and to reading and getting to understand all the materials. This stage is also better done with the author’s help. Here we decide on the general style and character of the future translation in order to reach the main goal and atmosphere of a book.
What is our main goal?
The aim of any book translation is to have the translation to influence the Russian reader the same way as it does the English text reader, to produce the same feelings and understanding. That is why the translator first needs to read up the whole book and to feel it’s style, character, to understand the context.
Let’s get down to work
Only after setting up a team, reading the whole text and building the glossary in cooperation with the author we get down to work.
And remember: there are three parameters of doing a good job: cost, speed and quality. If you want one of them more than the other, the others will not stick well. For instance, if you will search for those, who are ready to reduce cost, you will never get the desired quality and so on. If you want to do it quickly… Again, quality will be affected.
Quality matters
Do we do our job well? Yes, we do. This is simply the fact. You can check our translations reviews made by our customers. They are all authentic and 100% positive and you can connect to all those people and ask about us if you want to get to know us better.
Please, write us on e-mail or upload your materials directly from this site and we’ll get in touch with you with our quote for the services. With our team you’ll save up a lot. You won’t have to pay to translating agencies or spend additional cost on managers. You can work directly with Russian and Ukrainian translators and this is really an opportunity to make things easier and more effective.