I am a freelance Russian-to-English translator based in Moscow. Naturally enough, I can do English-to-Russian translations, but I choose not to pursue this as my core activity for the following reasons:
1) I have near-native command of English, at least as far as writing goes (I speak fluent English, but I do have a bit of an accent, which, oddly enough, is not readily identifiable as Russian).
2) I enjoy writing in English.
3) I do not enjoy writing in Russian. I can churn out decent copy in Russian on technical/academic subjects, having penned quite a few research papers when doing my postgraduate studies and working as a researcher. I have kept my hand in since then by doing occasional English-to-Russian jobs and I pride myself on my Russian grammar, including punctuation (and I can type fairly fast by touch in Russian as well as in English). If truth be told, I haven’t read a single novel in Russian since my late teens. I have read a lot of textbooks, etc., to be sure, but otherwise my reading has been centred almost exclusively on English literature. I have read enough books in French, German, Spanish and Italian (and even a couple of books in Latin) to be a fluent reader in these languages, but I gave up on languages other than English some five years ago. In fact, now that I work full time as a translator I have stopped reading anything other than the translation source material. I still occasionally read books on translation, English grammar and style, subject matter of my translation work, such as petroleum, law, etc., but mostly because I simply enjoy reading stuff on my Sony Reader PRS-505. What I do instead of reading is listening to audio books, putting in as many as 4-5 hours of listening experience a day during my workouts, meals, etc.
4) I prefer to stay out of the niche of English-to-Russian translation in Russia because I neither want nor need this kind of work and feel reluctant to steal bread from other translators who have nothing but English-to-Russian service to offer.
1) I have near-native command of English, at least as far as writing goes (I speak fluent English, but I do have a bit of an accent, which, oddly enough, is not readily identifiable as Russian).
2) I enjoy writing in English.
3) I do not enjoy writing in Russian. I can churn out decent copy in Russian on technical/academic subjects, having penned quite a few research papers when doing my postgraduate studies and working as a researcher. I have kept my hand in since then by doing occasional English-to-Russian jobs and I pride myself on my Russian grammar, including punctuation (and I can type fairly fast by touch in Russian as well as in English). If truth be told, I haven’t read a single novel in Russian since my late teens. I have read a lot of textbooks, etc., to be sure, but otherwise my reading has been centred almost exclusively on English literature. I have read enough books in French, German, Spanish and Italian (and even a couple of books in Latin) to be a fluent reader in these languages, but I gave up on languages other than English some five years ago. In fact, now that I work full time as a translator I have stopped reading anything other than the translation source material. I still occasionally read books on translation, English grammar and style, subject matter of my translation work, such as petroleum, law, etc., but mostly because I simply enjoy reading stuff on my Sony Reader PRS-505. What I do instead of reading is listening to audio books, putting in as many as 4-5 hours of listening experience a day during my workouts, meals, etc.
4) I prefer to stay out of the niche of English-to-Russian translation in Russia because I neither want nor need this kind of work and feel reluctant to steal bread from other translators who have nothing but English-to-Russian service to offer.
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