Russian Language: Facts for Translators

Russian (ru, rus) is a world language. Wikidata records about 154M speakers. It is written in Cyrillic script. It is an official language in 4 countries, including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia and Russian Empire.

Russian has six cases, three genders and complex plural rules; formal вы vs informal ты. Cyrillic text may need different fonts.

Expect text translated from English into Russian to grow by roughly 10–25%, which matters for layouts, subtitles and page counts.

In the United States, 1,020,261 people aged 5+ speak Russian at home (Census ACS), and 422,601 of them (41%) speak English less than "very well" — a key indicator of demand for Russian translators and interpreters.

154M

Speakers

+10…+25%

Text length vs English

$0.07–0.15

Indicative rate / word

US home speakers

Translation guides

Where Russian is official

Belarus
Kazakhstan
Russia
Russian Empire

Rates for Russian translation

Russian falls in our central & eastern european band: roughly $0.07–$0.15 per word for general commercial work. These are indicative ranges, not quotes — specialised, certified and rush work costs more, and literary translation is usually priced per 1,000 words.

For context, the median salaried translator or interpreter in the US earned $60,170 in May 2025 (BLS). See salaries by state →

Translation cost calculatorEstimate a quote by language, word count, subject and deadline.

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Where Russian is spoken in the US, state by state →

From Wikipedia

Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russian people. Russian was the de facto official language of the former Soviet Union. It has remained an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, has constitutional status as the language of inter-ethnic communication in Tajikistan, and is still used as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel.