Translate a PDF into Russian and keep the original layout

What changes when a PDF goes into Russian

A PDF locks every line into a fixed-size box. Russian text is longer than English, so a phrase that fits on one line in the source can need more room in translation. Long words make it harder still: достопримечательности (sights, tourist attractions) has twenty-one letters, and a footer reading ‘Page 3 of 10’ becomes Страница 3 из 10.

To keep the translation inside the original box, Manuce reduces the text size until it fits. The page keeps its structure, but a cover title, a figure caption or a narrow table cell may come out smaller than in the source. That is the trade-off for a layout that stays exactly where it was.

Fonts are the other issue. Many PDFs embed only a subset of each font, limited to the characters the document actually uses, so a font embedded in an English, French or German PDF often contains no Cyrillic glyphs at all, and a font without Cyrillic displays empty boxes. Manuce sets the translation in the original font or an equivalent one. Compare weights and italics with the source. Cyrillic italics may surprise you: italic т looks like an ‘m’ and и like a ‘u’, which is simply how those letters are drawn.

Russian conventions to check in the translated PDF

A sound translation also follows Russian typographic practice, which differs from English and other European languages in several places:

• Punctuation: no space before a colon, semicolon, question mark or exclamation mark. If your source is French, ‘Remarque :’ becomes Примечание:.
• Quotation marks: angle quotes with no inner spaces, «текст». A spaced em dash is used for dialogue and often stands in for the verb ‘to be’: Москва — столица.
• Numbers: decimal comma and a space as thousands separator, so 1,250.50 becomes 1 250,50; the currency symbol follows the amount, 1 500 ₽.
• Dates: 12.03.2025 or 12 марта 2025 г., with months and weekdays in lower case. Ambiguous source dates such as 03/12/2025 need checking before translation.
• Headings: only the first word is capitalised, so ‘Annual Financial Report’ becomes Годовой финансовый отчёт.
• Four plural forms: 1 страница, 2 страницы, 5 страниц, 21 страница. A fixed label such as ‘attachment(s)’ has no direct equivalent and has to be rephrased.
• Register: in a letter to one person, the polite ‘you’ is often capitalised, Вы.
• Proper names: names of people and companies are transliterated. Make sure they match the spelling already in use, for instance in a passport or an existing contract.

What Manuce delivers, and what it does not do

Manuce reads each text block of the PDF together with its position, font, size and colour. You receive:

• the re-laid PDF: the original text is removed and the Russian placed in the same box, in the original font or an equivalent; images and background stay in place. The layout work is included in the price;
• a Word version with editable text, for adjusting a phrase or reworking a crowded page;
• a formatted PDF and the plain text, handy for review or reuse.

Russian is written left to right, so the re-laid PDF is produced, unlike Arabic or Hebrew, for which only the Word, formatted PDF and text versions are delivered. Russian carries a ×1.25 coefficient on the per-word rate.

What Manuce does not do:

• it does not read a scanned PDF, meaning a page image with no selectable text;
• because images are kept as they are, text baked into an image (a logo, a chart exported as a picture) stays in its original language;
• it does not produce sworn or certified translations. If an authority or consulate requires a certified Russian translation of a certificate, diploma or court document, you need a sworn translator.

Preparing the PDF and checking the result

1. Test text selection: open the PDF, select a sentence and paste it into a text editor. If nothing pastes or you get garbled characters, the file is a scan: run it through character recognition software first, or go back to the source file.
2. Pick the free sample carefully: choose a paragraph with figures, a date and a proper name, so you can judge the Russian output before paying.
3. Check tight areas: headers, tables, footnotes and boxed text are where size reduction shows most. If a passage becomes too small to read comfortably, shorten it in the Word version.
4. Look for empty boxes: a single box in place of a letter means a Cyrillic glyph is missing from the displayed font.
5. Review figures and names: amounts, dates in DD.MM.YYYY format and transliterations should be consistent from page to page.

For a document that will be published or signed, have a Russian speaker review it, or choose the Premium level, which adds a cross-review.

In practice

1. Check that the text in your PDF can be selected: scanned pages are not read.
2. Upload the PDF, get the instant quote based on the exact word count and pick a level.
3. Read the free sample paragraph in Russian, then pay to start the translation.
4. Download the re-laid PDF, the Word version, the formatted PDF and the plain text.
5. Check areas where text was shrunk, plus figures, dates and proper names.