On this page you'll find tips and information for working in a language that may be new to you, such as Ukrainian and Russian.
What's the difference?
Transliteration is the process of transforming a set of letters in one alphabet (such as the Ukrainian abetka in Cyrillic script) into another alphabet (such as the English alphabet in Latin script). Although many languages use the Cyrillic writing system, their alphabets are slightly different, with differing letters and different letters representing different sounds, so they need to be transliterated accordingly.
We use this tool to transliterate when needed; it uses the American Library Association - Library of Congress (ALA-LC) standard. We should never use Google Translate to transliterate something since it does not follow this standard and will produce strange results because it is attempting to translate, rather than transliterate. (For example: Леонід Войцехов becomes Leonid Wojciechow in Google Translate, which is incorrect, and is correctly transliterated as Leonid Voǐt͡sekhov by the tool.)
Translation, on the other hand, is the process of taking the meaning of something expressed in one language and expressing it in another. (For example, in English, the Ukrainian phrase "я люблю бігати" would be translated as "I like to run.") There is no such thing as an "exact" translation between languages and often ideas can be expressed in multiple different ways in the langauge they're being translated into.
In the event that you find yourself needing to know what text says in a language you do not read, there are a few things that can help you.
Google Translate uses neural machine translation to process text. It's limited to 5,000 characters at a time, so if you're trying to read a webpage, the Google Translate browser plugin is a good option for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. This can translate highlighted sections of text on a page by clicking the icon that appears beside it or translate an entire webpage at once (works great with Wikipedia) with the toolbar icon.
All this being said, if you can't read the langauge you're working with, you shouldn't be using these tools to provide any kind of detailed translations, but rather to help you understand the context of what you're working on. Please refer to the documentation of the project you're involved with to see situations in which these tools are useful.
If you're stumped on something and need some help, ping the Translation channel on Slack!
Ukrainian and Russian (and many other languages, of course!) are case languages, a concept which will be less familiar to native English speakers, since English no longer has a case system.
A grammatical case is a set of noun and adjective forms that are declined in specific ways to serve a specific purpose in a sentence. The most obvious marker of how nouns are declined according to case in Ukrainian and Russian are different endings after the stem. A noun in the nominative case, for instance, typically serves as the subject of a sentence. Ukrainian has seven cases, while Russian has six. Many other Indo-European languages use a grammatical case system as well-- the Slavic languages (to which Ukrainian and Russian belong) and Baltic languages have particularly robust systems-- and so do a variety of other languages across the globe from other families.
In short, the case system means that we cannot merely copy and paste things like people's names, place names, etc., because we may then be using them in the incorrect case. (And remember, this is not a problem solved by transliteration, since that only reflects the same form of the name in a different alphabet.)
For a person's name, we would want to find the nominative form of their name (Wikipedia is often a good place to do this). (For example, "Портрет гетьмана Богдана Хмельницького," which translates to "Portrait of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky," contains "гетьмана Богдана Хмельницького" in the genitive case, indicating that this is who is in the portrait. Contrast that with "гетьман Богдан Хмельницький," which is his title and name in the nominative case.)
A helpful tool when you need a reference is Wikipedia. Different language Wikipedias can be accessed by adding a two-letter language code (the ISO 639-1 code) at the beginning of the url. For instance:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/ is the Ukrainian Wikipedia
https://ru.wikipedia.org/ is the Russian Wikipedia
https://pl.wikipedia.org/ is the Polish Wikipedia
These can also be found from the main Wikipedia screen, or under the List of Wikipedias by Language Group. Articles also link to their counterparts in other languages (if such an article exists) on the left-hand bar, at the bottom.
Another way to view all the articles about a person, place, etc. is to use Wikidata. (This is especially helpful for English-only readers since many entities reflected in the Russian and Ukrainian Wikipedias are not in the English Wikipedia.) You can search in any number of languages on Wikidata, since it's the linked data counterpart to Wikipedia (just remember you should be searching with the nominative). Wikidata, like Wikipedia, is only as good as the data entered, so there may be lacunae in what information is available. Looking at a developed record such as this one however, we can see that there is a list of links (sometimes displays on the bottom, sometimes on the right-hand side depending on the size of your screen) to all of the different Wikipedias that have an article about this person (Bohdan Khmelnytsky, in this case) and we can easily check out the article on Ukrainian Wikipedia about him.
Here are some resources on various topics:
A simplified guide to Ukrainian cases
Introduction to Ukrainian Cases
Duolingo Ukrainian Offers some small lessons on the web version and gamified learning on both the website and the app. Also features a "Letters" feature that helps you learn the abetka.
Duolingo Russian Similar to the Ukrainian course, but more robust (more content offered, and more challenging levels).