In Scotland recently translation companies have undercut market rates to win the contracts to supply interpreters to Scottish courts and other government services. A court interpreter said the new conditions meant interpreters were effectively being forced to work for less than the minimum wage. It takes many years of practice and training to get to a level that is sufficiantly competent to carry out intricate work in a high pressured environment like court. A lot of interpreters and translators are forced out of the profession because of the low rates of pay.

For better value for money and greater efficiency a professional translator should be engaged.

I, as a professional English Russian translator, am supposed to provide a high quality translation, carry out all the stages of translation myself and as a result to receive less than a minimum payment. I think, OK, at least I have an experience and I am in demand. But I would rather take part in projects for non-profit organisations for free. At least I have a feeling of fulfillment and commitment. And I do what I personally love – translating from English to Russion and from Russian to English.

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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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