St. Petersburg, Russia - Document Translation Services

One Russian name, several possible spellings in Latin letters

This is the single most common reason a file assembled here gets sent back. Cyrillic has no one true conversion into the Latin alphabet, and the systems in circulation disagree with each other on exactly the letters that appear in ordinary names. Александр can reach a form as Aleksandr or as Alexander. Юрий can become Yuri, Yury, Yuriy or Iurii depending on which rule the clerk was following. The letter щ turns into shch under one convention and sch or shh under another, and the soft sign either vanishes or becomes an apostrophe. None of these is a mistake in the abstract. They only become a mistake when two documents in the same application spell the same person two different ways.

There is a practical way out. The travel passport carries a Latin transliteration generated by the rules used for machine-readable documents, and that spelling is the one foreign authorities already hold, because it is the one their border and visa systems captured. Take the name exactly as the passport prints it and use that spelling everywhere, including in the translation of a birth certificate that has never contained a single Latin character. Where the source document itself shows a different Latin spelling from an older passport, say so rather than quietly choosing one.

The patronymic is the other half of the problem. Every Russian civil record gives three name elements, and the middle one, Ivanovich or Ivanovna and their many cousins, is formed from the father's given name. It is not a middle name, and there is no field for it on most English-language forms. Dropping it from the translated document is tempting and unwise, because the original shows three elements and a reviewer comparing them will count. Keep all three in the translation and let the applicant work out where they fit on the form.

Academic documents travel as a pair

A little about St. Petersburg

Peter the Great founded the city on 27 May 1703 with the intention of making it the new capital, and laid it out across the delta of the Neva, which is why it is threaded with rivers, canals and bridges. The Peter and Paul Fortress from that first year still stands on its island, and the cathedral inside it holds the tombs of most of the emperors who came after him.

The Hermitage, spread through the Winter Palace on Palace Square, is among the oldest and largest museums anywhere, and the Russian Museum in the Mikhailovsky Palace holds the counterpart collection of national art. St. Isaac's Cathedral carries a golden dome and a colonnade with a view over the rooftops; the Bronze Horseman on Senate Square gave Pushkin the subject of a poem that fixed the city in the literary imagination; the Mariinsky has been staging opera and ballet since the eighteenth century; and the Summer Garden laid out by Peter himself is still a park. In midsummer the White Nights keep the sky light almost around the clock, and the city builds a festival around them.

The reason any of this appears on a translation page is straightforward. A city with this many universities, institutes and long-established families generates a steady stream of diplomas, certificates and archival records that have to be read somewhere else, in another alphabet.