Russian Translation Services

Certified Russian to English translation for USCIS, immigration court, universities and credential evaluators — from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and across the former Soviet space, including Soviet-era records. From $25 a page certified, $35 with notarization.

Russian is not one country’s paperwork

Most Russian-language documents we translate were not issued in Russia. Russian was the administrative language of the entire Soviet Union, and its documents remain in active circulation from the Baltic to the Pamirs. A birth certificate issued in Tashkent in 1978, a work book from Almaty, a diploma from Kyiv and a marriage certificate from Minsk are all Russian-language documents on very similar all-union forms.

That matters practically, because the issuing bodies, place names and administrative units differ even when the language does not. A translator who assumes every Russian document is Russian will mistranslate the geography — and place names in a birth certificate are exactly what an officer cross-checks.

What we translate

• Russian Birth Certificate
• Russian Marriage Certificate
• Russian Divorce Certificate
• Russian Passport
• Russian Diploma
• Russian Academic Transcript
• Russian Police Clearance Certificate
• Russian Death Certificate
• Russian Employment Record Book
• Russian Military Service Record
• Russian Driver’s Licence
• Russian Medical Record

Also court judgments, asylum declarations, powers of attorney, property and inheritance documents, bank statements, corporate records and personal correspondence. Send it and pay online.

Soviet-era documents

A large share of our work is documents older than the countries that issued them. These have characteristics that catch out translators who have only handled modern paperwork:

• Nationality fields. Soviet certificates record the parents’ национальность — ethnicity, not citizenship. Translating it as “nationality” without a note invites exactly the wrong reading from an American officer, who will take it to mean citizenship.
• Administrative units that no longer exist. Oblasts renamed, districts merged, cities renamed twice. We render the name as printed and note the modern equivalent where it helps.
• Handwriting across decades, in registry books completed by many different hands, with abbreviations specific to Soviet clerical practice.
• Organisational stamps from entities that dissolved in 1991, which still have to be translated as they appear.

The трудовая книжка — the document nobody wants to price

The Soviet-style employment record book deserves its own mention, because it is where cheap translation is most obviously cheap. It is a bound booklet containing every job a person ever held: hire date, position, the order number authorising it, termination date and the legal ground cited, each entry stamped and initialled, often across thirty or forty years and several different handwritings.

Translated properly, every entry is carried across with its order numbers and legal grounds intact, because for an H-1B or I-140 petition the whole point of the document is to establish exactly how many years of qualifying experience the person has. Translated cheaply, entries get summarised, order numbers get dropped, and the petition loses the very evidence it was submitted to provide.

Name transliteration

Russian names transliterate several valid ways — Юрий can be Yuri, Yuriy or Iurii, all defensible. What matters is consistency with the passport and with every other document in the filing. Send us the passport spelling when you order and we conform the translation to it. Where the original itself shows variant spellings, we note the variance rather than quietly harmonising it.

Frequently asked

Guides for Russian documents