While writing this article, there is import ban of a list of products and goods in Russia. And considerable reassessment of rouble cost relatively the world currencies impacted upon the turnover more than the administrative restrictions. I guessed that Readers of our column ‘Translation News’ would be curious to learn some facts concerning the way the embargo and sanction affect translators’ work in Russia.
We’ve lost the half of our foreign colleagues translators.
First of all cheap rouble doesn’t allow to Russian companies to collaborate with translators abroad. Their fees in roubles have been reduced in double. And not every translator, no matter he aspires for a long-termed collaboration with our bureau, will agree with this income decline. We’re grateful very much to those ones who keep up with us. History has demonstrated many times that declines don’t last permanently. They are followed with recovery. However we should wait for it together.
Freight and customs documentation
Orders from transport companies to translate customs declarations and accompanying documents are more and more frequent in our bureau. It’s easy to guess that China is the main goods and food supplier in Russia. So, translations from Chinese have increased considerably in their volumes and in comparison with other languages for the last two years. We often get translation requests for customs documentation, accompanying the goods from China to Russia. Besides the customs declaration translation, this kind of work means one of the whole pack of the accompanying documents.
Foreign customers as a new trend in Russian economy
Now one in three translation customers is outside of Russia. So, ordering both translation and other services from abroad, foreign clients save enormous sums of money. Russian service and goods providers, even those one that have low quality rates, are able to compete at the international market through the dumping due to low labour and material costs.
Currency exchange control and increased bank commissions
The formed service and goods export current couldn’t help being noticed with our financial authorities. And as it often happens in Russia, some spongers like inspectors and controllers joined to it. Bank commissions for currency control agent services have increased manyfold. In some cases the situation becomes absurd. For a 540 roubles payment (that’s the price of a little page translated from Russian into Serbian, ordered by a foreigner in our bureau not long ago) the bank charged 750 roubles of a commission. I.e. we had to pay the rest to the bank for the translation we had done for free. This commission is unnoticed in the payment amount for oil exporters, while both service and small businesses can’t afford it.
