Slavic language spoken in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and broadly used, yet unofficially, in Latvia, Estonia and the many other countries that formed the republics of the former Soviet Union, Russian has such complexity that it became synonymous for something of difficult comprehension to Brazilians.
Thus, it is needless to say how much the translation of technical documentation in Russian to any language requires extra care and knowledge of both Slavic language and culture.

By Juliana Tavares
A land of countless palaces and churches, Russia was founded and directed by a noble class of Viking warriors and by their descendants, responsible for the conquest, annexation and exploration of territories—which made the Russian Empire the third greatest in history, extending from Poland, in Europe, all the way over to Alaska. A language of great writers, among which

Fiodor Dostoievski and Anton Tchekhov, Russian is currently spoken by 145 million people. It has its vocabulary, principles of word formation, inflections and literary style strongly influenced by ecclesiastic Slavonic, the first Slavic language, based on the ancient dialect spoken in the Thessaloniki region.

Formed by a many dialect, Russian had its phonology and syntax influenced by the many Finnic languages as well, such as Merya, Moksha, Muromian—many of which have already been extinct—and also by some European languages, such as Polish, Latin, Dutch, German, French and English. The detailed mapping of Russian dialects was initiated in the turn of the 20th century. In order to fathom the quantity of dialectal words, the Dialectological Atlas of the Russian Language was published in three volumes (1986-1989), after four decades of preparatory works. In 1990 the language's standardization was carried out, particularly in terms of vocabulary. But despite that, several dialects maintained distinct characteristics in terms of pronunciation and intonation, vocabulary and grammar.

As if all dialects were not enough, the ability of agglutinating and creating multiple compounds and diminutives in Russian means that the total number of words is difficult to be estimated.
Its grammar has a highly synthetic morphology and a syntax influenced by the Slavic Church, by Western European style and a polished vernacular base.

Written with a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, which consists in 33 letters, Russian has the marked feature of distinction between the consonant phonemes that have a secondary palatal articulation and those that do not have the so-called hard and soft sounds.

Nominal declination is subject to six grammatical cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental and propositional), in two numbers (singular and plural), and obeys the grammatical gender (masculine, feminine and neutral). However, up to 10 additional cases have been identified in linguistics books.

There are no definite or indefinite articles and the meaning of a noun is determined by the context where it is found. More than enough reasons for the translation of documents, technical ones in particular, for Russian to be a task best performed by highly qualified and updated professionals.