Most documents we receive for translation are in a single language – normally the official language of the country of issue. However, there are exceptions to this. These include recent degree or diploma certificates (which often include a translation into English) and birth certificates from the Soviet era (which contain Russian as well as the republic’s national language).

As the Latin alphabet is used in Germany, any Cyrillic script in the original must be transliterated (converted into the Latin alphabet) in accordance with ISO 9:1995 (E). This standard provides a Latin equivalent for each Cyrillic character. These equivalents sometimes use diacritic marks as well as letters. This is especially relevant where a Cyrillic character has no direct equivalent in the Latin alphabet, as is the case with ‘ж’. According to the ISO standard, this should be reflected as ‘ž’ (rather than ‘zh’). For example, the only difference between the representations of letters ‘ш’ and ‘щ’ lies in the diacritics ‘š’ and ‘ŝ’, which show whether or not these sibilants are voiced.

You can often identify the document’s original language (source language) by the way people’s names are written and transliterated. Thus, the patronymic ‘Pavlìvna’ will appear on more recent Ukrainian documents, while older Soviet versions often use the Russian variant ‘Pavlovna’. Another example is the Ukrainian ‘Ìgorìvna’ as against the Russian ‘Igorevna’.