Russian Translation

[strozzi]

I can translate cyrillic Russian to English but am often copied in on messages written using a standard Eng keyboard. How can I translate messages written in this format from Ru to Eng ?

[smorodina]

Do you mean transliterated using latin letters? I find it a bit harder to translate Russian written with latin characters, but provided a standard method has been used it's just a bit slower. There's no problem with encodings, of course, so what is your difficulty? Can you be a bit more specific?

[strozzi]

Yes, I am refering to transliterated text using latin letters.
For example : Privet moya lyubimaya. Ya nashol komp. U svoego druga. Poetomu mogu sei4as nikuda ne speshit.
Hope that example is not rude.
I need to convert that to cyrillic so that I can then translate to English.

[smorodina]

Provided the person doing the translit has stuck to the correct method, you can use this chart: http://users.accesscomm.ca/doukhobor.genealogy/Tra
nsliteration.htm Do you need to do this in order to use a translating program? Here it is in cyrillic: ������ ��� �������. � ����� ���� (?). � ������ �����. ������� ���� ������ ������ �� �������. Don't know about komp, could be short for companion or company.

[smorodina]

...or computer, in which case it means something like: Hello, my love. I have found a computer at my friend's. Therefore I can't rush off anywhere.

[strozzi]

Thanks Smorodina. It's a long winded job for me to rewrite from Latin to cyrillic. I wondered if there was a programme to do it automatically. My knowledge of the language is very limited and it takes me forever to rewrite a long mail and then translate it.

[smorodina]

Fewer letters are used in translit to represent the Russian sounds and this makes it almost impossible for a program to convert acurately to cyrillic, although it is not a major problem the other way. There are a few conversion programs, but the only one I know of that works from latin to cyrillic is 'convert'. However this is a dos based program so it's not very easy to use unless your happy with working in dos. You can get it on this page: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PaulGor/p
age.htm#cvt-dos

[strozzi]

Thanks for your help. I'm going off to find a full time interpreter. I've now received some handwritten letters. Transliteration is bad enough ...... but handwritining seems to be even worse !