Russian to Kazakh Translation

This direction is used when a document drawn up in Russian has to be submitted to an institution in Kazakhstan. The typical applicant is a Russian-speaking person who has moved to Kazakhstan in recent years, an entrepreneur taking up residence or setting up a business as a Russian citizen, or someone presenting a diploma obtained in Russia to a Kazakh authority. Because Kazakhstan is progressively shifting its administrative practice to Kazakh, documents for which Russian once sufficed are now requested with a Kazakh version at most institutions.

Concrete examples make the direction clear: a person applying for recognition or for a job in Kazakhstan with a Russian university diploma, a family submitting civil registry and marriage records issued in Russia to a Kazakh authority, a business passing a Russian company’s contracts and registry documents to its Kazakh partner. The document carries the Russian institutional order; the authority reading it assesses it in the Kazakh administrative language.

Technical points specific to Russian into Kazakh

Although the steps Kazakhstan has taken towards moving its official script to the Latin alphabet continue, the great majority of institutions today still use Kazakh in its Cyrillic form; for that reason it is settled before work begins whether the target script is to be Cyrillic or the transitional Latin form. Names of administrative units in Russian (for example область) are not replaced with the Kazakh equivalent (облыс) but kept in the form in which the document was drawn up and explained, because a translation is obliged to carry the meaning of the source, not to update it.

In recognition and immigration files the position of the seals, watermarks and registration numbers in the Russian documents is preserved in the translation; for the Kazakh authority these elements are the marks that confirm the document is genuine. Russian abbreviations of institutions and titles are not carried over into the Kazakh text as they stand; they are spelled out and given in their original form in brackets. When a person’s diploma, civil registry and service documents are translated from a single source with the same set of name spellings, the Kazakh institution can establish the link between two documents without difficulty.

Both languages use the Cyrillic alphabet, but Kazakh Cyrillic contains nine letters that Russian does not have (ә, ғ, қ, ң, ө, ұ, ү, һ, і). Translation is therefore not a transfer of letters: as a Russian name passes into a Kazakh text it is rebuilt with regard to these additional letters and to Turkic vowel harmony. The inflected structure of Russian, which does not pile suffixes at the end of the word, is turned into the agglutinative structure of Kazakh; a concept given in Russian with a preposition and a case ending is met in Kazakh by a succession of suffixes.

The structure of names is the main area of attention. In Russian documents a person is identified by a given name, a middle name derived from the father’s name (отчество) and a surname. In the Kazakh system the father’s name may traditionally be given with the suffix -ұлы (son of) or -қызı (daughter of); surnames with the Soviet-era -ов/-ова ending are also still in use. The translator does not choose between these forms unaided: the spelling in the source document is preserved, and which form appears in the official identity document is fixed according to the passport. Otherwise a mismatch of names arises at the notarial stage.

Names of institutions and places are likewise not translated but rendered by their function. The name of a ministry or a region in Russia is left as it stands in the Kazakh text and an explanation is added; a forced Kazakh equivalent misrepresents the area of competence. Dates and amounts are not converted; they are carried over in the form of the source.

Which documents call for this direction

• Russian diplomas, transcripts of marks and course descriptions (for recognition)
• Civil registry, marriage and birth records
• Employment contracts and service certificates
• Company registry records, powers of attorney and commercial contracts
• Annexes to residence and immigration applications

Part of the demand comes from education and employment files, part from the intensive business and family ties between Russia and Kazakhstan. In diploma files the detailed breakdown of courses and credits is preserved; a summarised translation brings the recognition assessment to a standstill. In commercial files the names of the parties and the company types are rendered exactly.

Chain of certification

Because the destination is Kazakhstan, certification follows the Kazakh regime: the translation is notarised (нотариалды аударма), and since Kazakh and Russian are both in official use, which language is required varies with the institution applied to. Whether an apostille is expected on a document arriving from Russia may vary with the document and the institution; confirm the names of the authorities and current practice from the certification regime of the country concerned and from the document type requirements.

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The information below is for guidance; in this language pair the level of certification is determined by the destination institution. We recommend following the practice in force through official announcements.