For most of us the Internet is a place browsed exclusively in English.  We are looking for the information we want as quickly and easily as possible, so don’t usually give other language pages a second thought.  But here’s a newsflash for you – there are people in the world, whose first language is not English.  Worse – there are people, who do not speak any English at all, and they are using the internet too, and they want content too.  More and more webmasters are cottoning on to this fact and are starting to provide alternative language translations of their websites.  For those looking for website translation, English to Russian is one of the first and most important languages to provide, and in this article we are going to look at why.

English to Russian translation opens up a large new market to you, that other languages – such as Spanish and French do not.  Russian is the fourth most sought after language on the internet after English, Spanish and then French (Chinese dialects were ignored by this research group who were focussing on an ecommerce demand, which excludes most Chinese sites), but if you are going to choose a single language, then Russian is the one you want.  The reason for this is not obvious at first, but it has to do with Russia’s long isolation from the International community.

As members of the European Union, France and Spain have been exposed to English on a very regular basis.  Most people, who speak French or Spanish as a first language, have at least a little experience in English.  This holds true of other popular Asian languages too – English is a compulsory subject for Korean school students and semi-compulsory in Japan.  In Russia, however, English is less widely known, and it’s far more likely that someone searching for Russian content speaks only Russian.

Getting a website translation from English to Russian is also not a difficult thing to achieve; in fact, there are a number of tools online that can give you a machine translation instantly online.  These translations are adequate to convey information most of the time, but they are also obviously performed by a computer and not a person.  Learning a different language is not simply a case of knowing the appropriate word in the new language – it is a mixture of context, grammar and vocabulary.  A machine translation can adequately swap an English word for its Russian counterpart, but to a native Russian speaker the result will look amateurish at best.

In some cases, this simple translation will be adequate to pass on the content you are promoting, but when you are doing a website translation, it’s important to consider how professional you want the final result to be, and whether simply swapping words is going to achieve the desired result.

Here’s a simple test, you can try, with a machine translation.  Take your webpage and run your English to Russian Translation on it.  Now, take the resulting content and do another translation – this time Russian to English.  If your website translation uses word substitution, you are going to get a very grammatically strange translation.  Ask yourself, if this level of grammar is appropriate to your website.  If you visited this site as an English speaker – would you stay and read the content?  The answer you give will give you a good window as to whether a Russian speaker is likely to struggle through your English to Russian machine translation.

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It’s easy for us as English speakers to forget, that the internet is not simply a place for English speakers. WebPages are available in French, German, Russian, Chinese, and Korean – in fact, any language you care to name will have websites displayed in it. The reason, this is not immediately obvious to us, is because of how we tend to find our information online, and this gives us an interesting insight into who is doing a translation of a website from English to Russian.

Roughly 90% of first time visitors to a website will make their way there through a search in Google or one of the other popular search engines. This statistic gives the search engines a staggering amount of influence over the way we view the online world. One of the reasons, that this is so important, is that a search engine gains or loses its popularity based on the relevance of the results it returns. One of the first things that will make a search engine see a webpage as irrelevant is, if it is not in the same language as the search was performed.

Those people online, who want the most exposure to their websites, are beginning to understand that in order to get the most eyeballs looking at their page, they need to provide multilingual options. So, who is doing a translation from English to Russian? Put simply – smart webmasters who recognize that for a small amount of invested time or money they can increase their online reach significantly! While Russian ranks well behind English in terms of the number of searches that are performed each month, it is still a significant and largely untapped source of traffic for many sites.

Many Russians are actually already doing some translation of websites themselves. Knowing that the vast majority of information on the Internet is in English, they will translate their query from Russian to English, search in an English speaking search engine and then translate the top pages the searched query returns from English to Russian. Can you see how desperately these Russian speakers want your content that they are prepared to go through that process to get it? Wouldn’t it be many times easier, if you were able to save them the trouble and provide a Russian speaking version to your website for them to search in their own language? And finally, don’t you think that someone who finds a Russian version of your page will appreciate your extra effort in providing the English to Russian translation for them, and be more likely to buy from you or support your website?

If you consider the increase in potential visitors, and the gratitude of the new visitors to your site that you have taken the time to convert your English Webpage into Russian to assist them, then providing Russian copy on your pages should really be a simple choice for you. You can either ignore it and not bother with the extra visitors to your site, or you can provide a lure for foreign language search engine traffic.

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