Localize App Store Screenshots to Russian

Why Russian matters

Russian reaches roughly 260M speakers across Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and a large global diaspora, and it is a highly literate audience that spots machine translation fast. Cyrillic sets about 10-15% wider than Latin at the same point size, so lines that fit comfortably in English overflow. The sharpest trap is italics: true Cyrillic cursive reshapes letters like т and и entirely, so a font that merely slants the upright forms looks visibly wrong to natives.

Localization tips for Russian

1. 1 Cyrillic runs ~10-15% wider per line than Latin even at similar character counts. Budget extra horizontal space.
2. 2 Italic Cyrillic is genuinely different: cursive г, д, и, й, п, т reshape (italic т looks like a Latin 'm', и like 'u'); many Latin-first fonts fake-slant the upright glyphs, which reads as broken. Prefer weight over italic or a font with real Cyrillic italics.
3. 3 Russian has six grammatical cases, so a button or label auto-translated in isolation often lands in the wrong case (nominative where accusative is needed). Proofread with a native speaker.
4. 4 Default to the formal 'Вы' (capitalized in direct address) for most apps; reserve informal 'ты' for youth and social products.
5. 5 Keep the brand name in Latin ('Shotlingo'); transliterating to Cyrillic (Шотлинго) reads dated and lowers trust.
6. 6 Use Russian number and currency formatting. Ruble sign ₽ after the amount and space-separated thousands (1 000 ₽), not '$' or comma grouping.

Fonts for Russian

PT Sans / PT Serif (ParaType, purpose-built for Cyrillic), Roboto, Noto Sans and IBM Plex Sans all ship true Cyrillic italics. Verify the italic forms of г, д, и, п, т are cursive rather than slanted-Latin shapes, and that ё and й keep their diacritics.

Russian localization FAQ