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# Translating from Ukrainian

**On this page**

1. [1. Principles for a Ukrainian source](#1-principles-for-a-ukrainian-source)
2. [2. Meaning before form in a Ukrainian source](#2-meaning-before-form-in-a-ukrainian-source)
3. [3. Register and style in a Ukrainian source](#3-register-and-style-in-a-ukrainian-source)
4. [4. Terminology in Ukrainian sources](#4-terminology-in-ukrainian-sources)
5. [5. False friends out of Ukrainian](#5-false-friends-out-of-ukrainian)
6. [6. Grammar transfer from Ukrainian](#6-grammar-transfer-from-ukrainian)
7. [7. Idioms, culture-bound items and songs](#7-idioms-culture-bound-items-and-songs)
8. [8. Names, numbers, dates, typography in Ukrainian sources](#8-names-numbers-dates-typography-in-ukrainian-sources)
9. [9. Quality checks for translations out of Ukrainian](#9-quality-checks-for-translations-out-of-ukrainian)
10. [10. Worked examples: Ukrainian sources into English and French](#10-worked-examples-ukrainian-sources-into-english-and-french)
11. [11. Ukrainian sources by domain](#11-ukrainian-sources-by-domain)
12. [12. Surzhyk in practice: three cases](#12-surzhyk-in-practice-three-cases)
13. [13. Historical and diaspora orthographies](#13-historical-and-diaspora-orthographies)
14. [14. How Mova handles it](#14-how-mova-handles-it)
15. [Sources](#sources)

This manual is about **reading Ukrainian as a source**: what a translator must notice in a Ukrainian text before writing English, French or another target. Ukrainian says with endings, aspect and word order what English and French say with articles, auxiliaries and fixed order; it drops subjects, marks the gender of the past, addresses people in the vocative, and colours words with diminutives and particles that have no one-word equivalent. It also has a register range from the official *канцелярит* to the spoken mixed variety **surzhyk**, which this manual treats as a variety with its own regularities, not as a heap of errors. Writing Ukrainian as a target is in [Translating into Ukrainian](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-uk/); the contrasts are in [English and Ukrainian: the pair manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/en-uk/) and [French and Ukrainian: the pair manual](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/pairs/fr-uk/).

## 1. Principles for a Ukrainian source

1. **Read endings, not only words.** Case endings tell subject from object whatever the order (*Сестру побачив брат* = "The brother saw the sister"); the past tense tells the gender of its subject (*прийшла* = she came); aspect tells completed from ongoing.
2. **Read the order as information.** Ukrainian word order is free in grammar and fixed in meaning: the given goes first, the new last. What English marks with *a/the* and French with *un/le*, or with clefts, Ukrainian marks with order.
3. **Place the text on the register map.** Language: Ukrainian. Variety modifier: the standard, a regional dialect (south-western, Carpathian, Polissian, Slobozhan, steppe), surzhyk, a diaspora variety, the orthography of 1928 kept in diaspora texts. Style of speech: official, neutral literary, colloquial, slang, song.
4. **Mind the political and historical charge of words.** Vocabulary in Ukrainian often carries a stance: Soviet-era terms against current ones, Russian borrowings against native words, place names in their Ukrainian or Russian form. A translator must notice it and keep it where it is meaningful.

## 2. Meaning before form in a Ukrainian source

### 2.1 Aspect

Every Ukrainian verb is perfective or imperfective, and the pair often differs by a prefix or suffix (*писати* / *написати*, *вирішувати* / *вирішити*). Aspect tells:

- **completed, single event** (perfective): *Я прочитав листа* = "I read (have read) the letter";
- **process, habit, repeated or unbounded action, or the action named without regard to completion** (imperfective): *Я читав листа* = "I was reading the letter" / "I read the letter (at some point)"; *Я часто читав листи* = "I often read letters".

English renders aspect by tense and lexis (simple past vs progressive, *used to*, *would*, *finish*, *manage to*); French by the imperfect against the passé composé or passé simple. The imperfective past of a single completed act (*Ти читав цю книжку?* "Have you read this book?") is the general-factual use and is a present perfect in English, a passé composé in French.

The **perfective present form** is the future: *прочитаю* = "I will read (and finish)"; the imperfective future is *буду читати* or *читатиму*.

### 2.2 Case and word order

Seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative) carry roles: *Петрові дали книжку* (dative: "Petro was given a book", "They gave Petro a book"). Word order then marks information: *Книжку дали Петрові* is "It was Petro they gave the book to" or "They gave the book to Petro" with *Petro* new. English needs a passive, a cleft or stress; French a cleft (*C'est à Petro qu'on a donné le livre*) or dislocation.

### 2.3 Particles

Ukrainian speech is full of particles that mark attitude: *же* / *ж* (insistence, "after all"), *адже* ("after all, since"), *хіба* (doubt, "really?"), *таки* ("after all, indeed"), *ну*, *от*, *ось*, *бо* ("because", and at the end "come on"), *ще* / *вже* ("still" / "already", also emotional), *ж бо*, *якраз*, *аж*. They have no single equivalents: *Я ж казав!* is "I told you so!"; *Таки прийшов* is "He did come after all"; *Хіба ти не знав?* is "Didn't you know?" with surprise. Rendering them by nothing flattens the speech; rendering each by a word overloads it. Choose by the target's means: intonation words (*after all*, *really*, *you see*), word order, a tag, French *quand même*, *donc*, *bien*, *pourtant*.

### 2.4 Diminutives and expressive suffixes

Ukrainian forms diminutives and augmentatives productively: *хата* → *хатка*, *хатинка*, *хатиночка*; *рука* → *ручка* (also "pen", "handle"), *рученька*; *сонце* → *сонечко* (also "ladybird"; "sweetie" in address). They express size, affection, irony, politeness (*Зачекайте хвилинку* = "Wait a moment", neutral, not "a little minute"). English has few productive diminutives and they sound childish (*doggie*); French has some (*-ette*, *-et*) with narrower use. The translator renders the **attitude**: affection by a word choice (*little*, *dear*, *old*), politeness by politeness, irony by irony, and nothing where the diminutive is lexicalised.

### 2.5 Verbal nouns and the impersonal

Official Ukrainian builds on verbal nouns in *-ння* / *-ття* (*здійснення*, *забезпечення*, *прийняття*) and on impersonal predicates in *-но* / *-то* (*Рішення ухвалено*, *Вікно розбито*: "The decision has been adopted", "The window has been broken"). The *-но/-то* form has no subject and is not a passive with an agent; when an agent is added in the instrumental (*ухвалено Радою*) the style is bureaucratic and criticised in the purist tradition as un-Ukrainian *(smerechynskyi-1932)*, though it is common in official texts. Into English, a passive or an active with the agent as subject; into French, a passive, *on* or an active.

### 2.6 The dative of experience and *у мене є*

Ukrainian states feelings and states with a dative: *Мені холодно* ("I'm cold"), *Йому сумно* ("He feels sad"), *Мені тридцять років* ("I'm thirty"). Possession is usually *у мене є* ("I have"). These become English and French subjects: *J'ai froid*, *Il est triste*, *J'ai trente ans*.

## 3. Register and style in a Ukrainian source

### 3.1 The scale

| style | marks |
| --- | --- |
| official, legal (*офіційно-діловий*) | verbal nouns, *-но/-то* forms, *слід*, *необхідно*, *з метою*, *відповідно до*, *у разі*, long nominal groups, fixed formulas (*Прошу надати …*, *Доводжу до Вашого відома …*) |
| neutral literary | the literary norm of the 2019 orthography, full forms, standard order |
| colloquial | dropped subjects, particles (§2.3), short forms, diminutives, free order, interjections, *шо* for *що* in eastern and southern speech |
| slang | youth and internet slang: borrowings from English (*крінж*, *краш*, *рофл*, *вайб*), clipped forms, Russian-origin slang with stylistic weight, army slang (*двохсотий*, *трьохсотий*, *арта*, *дрон*) |
| song | folk song (fixed epithets, short adjectives *зелен гай*, vocatives, diminutives, parallelism), popular song (colloquial grammar, slang, sometimes surzhyk) |

### 3.2 *Ти* and *ви*

Ukrainian distinguishes *ти* (singular informal) and *ви* (plural, and singular polite). The polite singular is capitalised in letters and official texts: *Шановний пане Іване! Дякую Вам за …*. Traditional usage addresses parents and elders with *ви* even within the family, which French *tu* and English *you* cannot show. Into English the contrast is lost; into French it maps onto *tu* / *vous*, with the family exception (French uses *tu* to parents).

### 3.3 The vocative and forms of address

Ukrainian has a living **vocative case**: *Іване!*, *Маріє!*, *пане професоре!*, *друже!*, *мамо!*. A parliamentary treebank study counted over 128 000 vocative contexts in the Rada's transcripts of 1990–2024 and found the vocative-to-nominative ratio in address varies strongly by word *(shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian)*. The vocative is neutral in Ukrainian; the nominative in address (*Іван, іди сюди*) is colloquial and is a contact feature. English and French have no vocative: render the address by name and punctuation; render *пане* / *пані* by *Mr* / *Mrs*, *Monsieur* / *Madame*, or, in fiction, by keeping *pan* / *pani* when the culture matters. The official address by first name and patronymic (*Іване Петровичу*) is formal respect, between a first name and a surname; in English often *Mr Petrenko*, in fiction sometimes kept.

### 3.4 Dialects

Ukrainian dialects (south-western, including the Galician and the Carpathian dialects of the Hutsuls, Boikos and Lemkos; northern Polissian; south-eastern) differ in vocabulary, pronunciation and some grammar. South-western dialects, for example, keep past forms with person clitics (*спав=єм* "I slept") and drop subject pronouns more than the standard *(fellerer-2022-pro-drop-sw)*. A dialect in literature (Stefanyk, Kotsiubynsky's Hutsul stories, many folk songs) is a variety modifier: render by the general manual's options (§3.5): normalise, signal, substitute, or invent; most good literary translations from Ukrainian signal.

### 3.5 Surzhyk: a variety, not a pile of errors

**What it is.** Surzhyk is Ukrainian–Russian mixed speech, spoken across central, eastern and southern Ukraine, in villages and towns, by people who are often fluent in neither standard. Its traditional form has a Ukrainian base: Ukrainian grammar and much Ukrainian vocabulary, with Russian words, forms and phonetics mixed in. Research on large field corpora shows it is **not random**: the choice between Ukrainian and Russian variants is regular, depending on region and on whether the verb stem is Ukrainian or Russian; most competing lexical pairs settle on one form across the whole territory; and in Muysken's typology the mixing is mostly congruent lexicalization *(hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive, hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon)*. Its authors describe it as a regionally differentiated mesolectal continuum within Ukrainian, with its own norms, alongside a newer Russian-based mixed speech in the south *(hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon)*. As a language of childhood it was, in a 2020–2021 survey of the three Black Sea regions, about as common as Ukrainian or Russian, and about half the respondents used it often as adults, rarely as their only code *(hentschel-2022-black-sea-surzhyk)*. In writing it appears in dialogue in fiction, in comedy, in popular song, in social media, and as an object of mockery or of affection.

**How to recognise it.** A text is surzhyk, not standard colloquial Ukrainian and not Russian, when it combines Ukrainian grammar with Russian items of several kinds, regularly:

| level | surzhyk features (examples) | standard Ukrainian |
| --- | --- | --- |
| lexicon | *шас* / *щас*, *канєшно*, *вобщем*, *тіпа*, *ладно*, *пасіба*, *можна сказать*, *всьо* | *зараз*, *звісно*, *загалом*, *типу* (colloquial) / *ніби*, *гаразд*, *дякую*, *можна сказати*, *усе* |
| phonetics in spelling | Russian *о* unreduced or *ё* as *йо*, Russian *ы* as *и*: *кароче*, *нармально* | *коротше*, *нормально* |
| morphology | Russian infinitive *-ть* where Ukrainian has *-ти* (*сказать*, *ходить*); Russian endings on Ukrainian stems | *сказати*, *ходити* |
| syntax | Russian government (*по ділу*, *по любому*, *згідно чого*) | *у справі*, *хай там як*, *згідно з чим* |
| mixed formulas | *Дай Бог здоровля*, *Ну шо, як діла?* | *Дай Боже здоров'я*, *Ну що, як справи?* |

Distinguish it from: **code-switching** (a speaker alternates whole sentences of Ukrainian and Russian; documented in the Rada's transcripts, where speakers switch to quote someone, to show tolerance, or under the other speaker's language, *(kanishcheva-2023-parliamentary-code-switching-corpus-bilingualism)*); **colloquial standard Ukrainian** (*шо* alone is a regional pronunciation, not surzhyk); **dialect** (south-western *спавєм* is dialect, not surzhyk); **Russian** with a Ukrainian word or two.

**What it means in a text.** Surzhyk in literature and on stage marks a character socially (rural or small-town, often older, or a newcomer to the city), sometimes comically, sometimes tenderly; in popular song it can be a deliberate persona and a source of humour and warmth; in social media it may be a stance (irony at pretension, or simply how the writer speaks). Note that the "russianisms" listed by derussification tools are not the same thing: those are Russian-calqued items in otherwise standard written Ukrainian (active participles in *-учий*, verbal nouns in *-ка*, *двох-* compounds), whose frequencies the VESUM project measures and offers replacements for *(starko-2025-dictionary-derussification)*; they mark a writer influenced by Russian, not a speaker of surzhyk.

**How to render a surzhyk-speaking character into English or French.**

1. **Decide whether the mix is meaningful.** If the text is a news interview with a villager whose speech is surzhyk, the meaning is in the facts: normalise (translate into plain colloquial English or French), perhaps with a note that the speaker uses mixed speech.
2. **If it characterises, signal it.** A non-standard but non-local target speech: colloquial grammar, a few clipped forms, a few deviant forms that read as "not the standard" without naming a place. In English: *we was*, *ain't*, *them things*, dropped *-g*; but beware: these mark English working-class or regional speech, and stacking them invents a Cockney or a Southern American. In French: dropped *ne*, *ça*, elisions, a few popular forms (*on s'en fout*, *bagnole*), again without a regional accent.
3. **Do not replace Russian items with words from a real target-language contact variety** (Franglais, Spanglish, Joual). That gives the character another nationality's history.
4. **Keep a mixed voice when the mixing is the point**: in comedy whose joke is the mixing, in songs whose persona is surzhyk, in a novel where a character's switch between surzhyk and standard is the plot. Then options are: a sprinkling of transliterated items with their meaning clear from context (*“Shcho, normal'no?”*), a note, or a substitute mixing with a third language the target reader hears as "the language of power" (rarely justified; usually it misleads).
5. **Never correct it silently into the standard target and then add a narrator's "she said in her broken Ukrainian"**: that adds a judgement the source did not make.

### 3.6 Russian in a Ukrainian text

Ukrainian texts quote Russian (a character, a slogan, a document). The translation keeps the shift visible: a note, italics, or "she said in Russian", because the switch of language often carries meaning: social, political, personal.

## 4. Terminology in Ukrainian sources

- **Legal and administrative terms** are fixed by the laws: *Верховна Рада України* (the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine), *Кабінет Міністрів України* (the Cabinet of Ministers), *постанова* (resolution, ruling), *наказ* (order), *розпорядження* (instruction), *обласна державна адміністрація* (regional state administration), *територіальна громада* (territorial community, *hromada*).
- **Changing terminology.** Since 1991, and strongly since 2014 and 2022, Ukrainian has replaced Soviet- and Russian-calqued terms with native or international ones; a translator reading an older text meets older terms (*міліція* before 2015, *поліція* after), and should translate the term of its time.
- **Military vocabulary** since 2022 is large and partly slang; the official term and the soldier's word differ (*загиблий* / *двохсотий*; *поранений* / *трьохсотий*), and the register choice must be kept.
- **Feminitives**: current Ukrainian names women by feminine nouns (*авторка*, *директорка*, *редакторка*; *кравчиня*, *філологиня*; *поетеса*) as the 2019 orthography describes *(ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019, § 32.4)*, and military feminitives have spread widely *(synchak-2023-military-feminine)*. A Ukrainian feminine role noun tells that the person is a woman; carry it into French (*la directrice*) and, where it matters, into English (*she*).

## 5. False friends out of Ukrainian

| Ukrainian | means | ✗ English look-alike | ✓ English | ✓ French |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *актуальний* | topical, relevant, pressing | actual | topical, relevant | *d'actualité*, *pertinent* |
| *аргумент* | argument (reason) | argument (quarrel) | argument, point | *argument* |
| *декада* | ten days | decade | ten days | *décade* |
| *магазин* | shop | magazine | shop | *magasin* |
| *журнал* | magazine, journal, register | journal (diary) | magazine, register | *revue*, *registre* |
| *фабрика* | factory | fabric | factory | *usine*, *fabrique* |
| *симпатичний* | nice, good-looking | sympathetic | nice, attractive | *sympathique* (nice only) |
| *інтелігентний* | cultured, well-mannered | intelligent | cultured, refined | *cultivé* |
| *ліквідувати* | eliminate, abolish, close down | liquidate | eliminate, abolish | *supprimer*, *éliminer* |
| *кабінет* | office (room), cabinet (of ministers), surgery | cabinet (furniture) | office | *bureau*, *cabinet* |
| *бал* | point, score; ball (dance) | ball | point, score | *point* |
| *клей* | glue | clay | glue | *colle* |
| *комфортний* | comfortable | comfortable (ok) |  |  |
| *претендувати* | lay claim to, apply for | pretend | claim, apply for | *prétendre à* |
| *артист* | performer, actor | artist (painter) | performer, actor | *artiste* (ok) |
| *аудиторія* | lecture room; audience | auditorium (hall) | lecture room, audience | *salle*, *public* |
| *конкурс* | competition, open selection | concourse | competition | *concours* (ok) |
| *кур'єр* | courier | courier (ok) |  |  |

### 5.1 The pair lists and the most frequent traps

The full lists, both directions, by domain and measured, are [English and Ukrainian: false friends](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/false-friends/en-uk/) and [French and Ukrainian: false friends](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/false-friends/fr-uk/); the context-dependent renderings of Ukrainian words (*справа*, *питання*, *рішення*, *мова*, *звернутися* …) are in [English and Ukrainian: renderings by context](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/context/en-uk/) and [French and Ukrainian: renderings by context](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/context/fr-uk/). The Ukrainian source words the corpora meet most often among the listed traps (Tatoeba and the 1905 Bible, counted 2026-11-06): *мати* + infinitive (*be to* as well as *have to*), *час* ("time"; "hour" is Russian *час*), *чоловік* (*man* or *husband* by context), *гроші* (plural, English singular *money*), *дзвонити кому* (dative: *call someone*), the grammatical gender of *сонце*, *місяць*, *дитина*, *особа* (not carried into English pronouns), *відповідати на* (*answer* directly), *двері* (plural for one door), *город* (a vegetable garden, not a city), *родина* (family, not "homeland" as Russian *родина*). The lists add the Russian-channel, surzhyk and Polish-channel traps, judged by usage and register as in §3.5.

## 6. Grammar transfer from Ukrainian

### 6.1 No articles

Recover definiteness for English and French from order, discourse and context ([Translating into English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/translation/into-en/) §6.1): *До кімнати зайшов чоловік* → *A man came into the room*; *Чоловік зайшов до кімнати* → *The man came into the room*.

### 6.2 Dropped subjects and gendered past

*Прийшла пізно, втомлена* → *She came late, tired* / *Elle est arrivée tard, fatiguée*. The past form and the agreeing adjective tell the gender; English needs a pronoun; French has it in the participle and adjective. First-person past forms tell the speaker's gender (*Я втомилася*): French keeps it (*Je suis fatiguée*), English loses it.

### 6.3 Negative concord

*Ніхто нічого не сказав* has three negatives and means "Nobody said anything". English uses one (a double negative is colloquial or song grammar); French has its own concord (*Personne n'a rien dit*).

### 6.4 Numerals and agreement

Ukrainian numerals govern case: *два столи* (nominative plural), *п'ять столів* (genitive plural), *двоє дітей* (collective numeral for children, people, paired things). Nothing to translate, but numbers must be read correctly: *півтора* is one and a half; *пів години* is half an hour; *з половиною* "and a half".

### 6.5 Reflexive verbs in *-ся*

*-ся* marks reflexive (*митися* "wash oneself"), reciprocal (*зустрітися* "meet"), middle (*двері відчинилися* "the door opened"), passive in the imperfective (*будинок будується* "the house is being built") and impersonal (*мені не спиться* "I can't sleep"). Each needs a different rendering.

### 6.6 Participles and adverbial participles

Ukrainian **adverbial participles** (*прочитавши*, *ідучи*) must share their subject with the main verb; render as English *-ing* or a clause, French *en* + participle or a clause. Ukrainian **active present participles** in *-учий/-ючий* are restricted in the standard (*подразнюючий* is criticised as a russianism; *подразнювальний*, *що подразнює* are preferred) *(starko-2025-dictionary-derussification)*; a source full of them is written under Russian influence, which may matter for register.

### 6.7 Tense in reported speech

Ukrainian keeps the original tense in reported speech: *Він сказав, що прийде* = "He said he would come"; *Вона сказала, що втомилася* = "She said she was tired". English back-shifts; French follows its *concordance des temps* (*Il a dit qu'il viendrait*).

## 7. Idioms, culture-bound items and songs

- **Idioms and proverbs**: *ллє як з відра* ("it's pouring"), *гарбуза дати* (to refuse a suitor: the pumpkin as a sign of rejection), *мати голову на плечах* ("have a good head on one's shoulders"), *не кажи гоп, поки не перескочиш* ("don't count your chickens"). Machine translation renders idioms literally most often, keeping the sense but losing the idiom *(petruniv-2026-simidioms-corpus-benchmark-ukrainian-idiom)*; *гарбуза дати* rendered literally ("give a pumpkin") is meaningless without its custom.
- **Realia**: *вишиванка* (embroidered shirt), *рушник* (embroidered ritual towel, not a towel in a bathroom sense), *кутя* (the Christmas Eve wheat dish), *Свят-вечір* (Christmas Eve), *колядки* and *щедрівки* (carols of Christmas and New Year), *громада* (community, now also an administrative unit), *НМТ* (the national entrance test). General manual §7.2.
- **Folk songs.** Ukrainian folk songs have fixed epithets (*червона калина*, *ясний сокіл*, *сиза зозуля*), parallelism (nature image, then the human event), vocatives, diminutives, and the short adjective (*зелен гай*). The epithet is part of the genre; keep it fixed (*the red guelder rose*, *l'obier rouge*), do not vary it.
- **Song translation kinds.** The New Year carol *Щедрик*, in Mykola Leontovych's arrangement of a folk text (both public domain), tells of a swallow that flies in and promises the master of the house a rich year. Its famous English version, *Carol of the Bells* (Peter Wilhousky, 1936, still in copyright and not quoted here), keeps the tune and the four-note ostinato and replaces the swallow and the promise with bells: it is a **new lyric** in the sense of the general manual's §9.1, not a translation of the text. A singable translation that keeps the swallow is a different product.
- **Songs in surzhyk and slang.** A popular song sung in surzhyk is not translated as errors: its mixing is its voice (§3.5). Render it by the target's colloquial song grammar, keep a few untranslated items if the persona needs them, and keep the humour.

## 8. Names, numbers, dates, typography in Ukrainian sources

- **Names**: romanise by the official Ukrainian system (*Olha*, *Volodymyr*, *Yevhen*, *Zghorany*; *ий* → *yi*; *г* → *h*, *ґ* → *g*, *х* → *kh*, *щ* → *shch*), which the EU recommends *(commission-1982)*; a person's own Latin spelling wins. French has its own tradition of transcription (*Chevtchenko*) beside the official system; follow the house style.
- **Patronymics** appear in official contexts (*Іван Петрович Петренко*); English and French usually drop them except in fiction and formal address.
- **Place names**: *Kyiv*, *Kharkiv*, *Odesa*, *Lviv*, *Zaporizhzhia*, *Dnipro* in current English; French varies (*Kyiv* / *Kiev*, *Odessa* / *Odesa*).
- **Numbers**: decimal comma (*3,5*), space for thousands (*15 000*); *мільярд* is 10⁹; *тис.*, *млн*, *млрд* abbreviations.
- **Dates**: *6 червня 2026 р.* or *06.06.2026*; centuries in Roman numerals (*XXI ст.*).
- **Typography**: « » without spaces; „ “ or “ ” inside; the dash for dialogue in prose, with spaces around a dash between words; the apostrophe is a letter-internal sign (*м'ясо*, *з'їсти*, in careful typography U+02BC ʼ), not a quotation mark; no full stop, comma, semicolon, colon or dash before a closing guillemet *(ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019, § 164)*.

## 9. Quality checks for translations out of Ukrainian

Add to the general checklist:

1. Every Ukrainian aspect was rendered by the target's tense and lexis (completed vs process, the general-factual imperfective).
2. Every dropped subject was supplied, with the gender the verb gave.
3. Definiteness was recovered for every English or French noun phrase.
4. Word order's information (new last) was kept by the target's means.
5. Particles and diminutives were rendered by attitude, not dropped wholesale or translated word by word.
6. The register was placed (official, neutral, colloquial, slang, song; dialect; surzhyk) and kept, signalled or normalised by a stated decision.
7. Names romanised by one system, place names current.

Typical labels: *accuracy / mistranslation / aspect*; *linguistic conventions / grammar / article* (in the target); *style / register* (surzhyk normalised where it characterised); *accuracy / mistranslation / false friend* (*актуальний* → *actual*); *audience appropriateness / culture-bound item unexplained* (*рушник*).

## 10. Worked examples: Ukrainian sources into English and French

### 10.1 Diminutives and attitude (Tatoeba, Ukrainian written first)

| id | Ukrainian | English or French | note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `tatoeba:2043719-1636575` | *Я частенько встаю дуже рано.* | *I often get up very early.* | the affectionate *частенько* lost |
| `tatoeba:3109225-3089014` | *Ти також дуже гарненька.* | *You're really pretty, too.* | the diminutive's warmth moved to *really* |
| `tatoeba:6483313-1582844` | *Що це за містечко?* | *What town is this?* | *містечко* ("little town", also a historic *shtetl*-type town) → *town* |
| `tatoeba:1152863-492027` | *В нашому містечку багато парків.* | *Il y a beaucoup de parcs dans notre ville.* | *містечко* → *ville*: the size lost; *petite ville* keeps it |
| `tatoeba:8756878-4109240` | *Ненька їй дзвонить.* | *Her mum is calling her.* | *ненька* → *mum* (colloquial, tender) |
| `tatoeba:12597559-5966924` | *Том пухленький.* | *Tom is podgy.* | attitude shifted from affectionate to slightly negative |
| `tatoeba:8053707-8053699` | *Томова пісенька проспівана.* | *Tom has had his chips.* | idiom → idiom |

Check every diminutive: is it **size** (*столик*, a small table), **affection** (*мамочка*), **politeness** (*хвилинку*), **irony** (*героїчок*), or **lexicalised** (*ручка* "pen")? Render the function.

### 10.2 What the Ukrainian forces into the open

Ukrainian already chose what English and French leave open, so translating out of it means keeping information English cannot always show:

- **Speaker's gender**: *Я щойно приїхала* (`tatoeba:257520-5733625`) tells that the speaker is a woman; English *I just arrived* cannot say it; French can only in a compound tense (*je suis arrivée*).
- **Means of motion**: *приїхав* / *прилетів* (`tatoeba:257520-5733622`, `-6797414`) tell "by vehicle" / "by air"; English *arrived* loses it unless the context needs it (*flew in*).
- **Aspect**: *Я прочитав книгу* (`tatoeba:989164-1567040`) is finished; *Я читаю книжку* (`tatoeba:989164-6388023`) is in progress.
- **Formality**: *Ви знаєте англійську?* vs *Ти говориш англійською?* (`tatoeba:378270-379467`, `-1584616`): French keeps *vous*/*tu*; English needs tone.

### 10.3 The 1905 Bible as a source: a historical delta

The Kulish/Puluj Bible (1905, public domain; bible) is written in the literary Ukrainian of its time, in its own spelling. Its features are an **archaic and regional delta** over today's standard:

| feature | example (id) | today |
| --- | --- | --- |
| synthetic future in *-му/-меш* (south-western) | *не мати му недостатку* (`bible-web-kulish:PSA_23:1`); *Не вбивати меш* (`bible-web-kulish:EXO_20:13`) | *не матиму*, *не вбиватимеш* (the same forms, now written together) |
| *ся* written apart | *Нехай святить ся імя твоє* (`bible-web-kulish:MAT_6:9`) | *святиться* |
| *сь* for *с* before soft consonants | *сьвіт* (`bible-web-kulish:GEN_1:3`) | *світ* |
| *ї* after consonants | *молїться* (`bible-web-kulish:MAT_6:9`), *поцїлував* (`bible-web-kulish:LUK_15:20`) | *моліться*, *поцілував* |
| aorist-like *рече*, Church Slavonic *єси*, *возьми* | *І рече Бог* (`bible-web-kulish:GEN_1:3`); *що його возлюбив єси* (`bible-web-kulish:GEN_22:2`) | *сказав*; *якого ти полюбив*; *візьми* |
| *імя* without apostrophe | *імя твоє* | *ім'я* |

Into English, this delta is the KJV's register (*thou wilt not kill*, *hallowed be thy name*) if the edition wants an old voice, or plain modern English otherwise; it is never a modern colloquial English. Into French, Louis Segond's register (*Tu ne tueras point*) is the match. And the same verse in three traditions shows how they differ beyond spelling: *Thou shalt not kill* (a command with *shalt*), *Tu ne tueras point* (future of command), *Не вбивати меш* (synthetic future "thou wilt not kill"); *The LORD is my shepherd* / *L'Éternel est mon berger* / *Господь пастирь мій*.

## 11. Ukrainian sources by domain

- **Law.** Laws are *закони*, codes *кодекси* (*Цивільний кодекс України*, the Civil Code of Ukraine), resolutions of the Verkhovna Rada and of the Cabinet *постанови*, decrees of the President *укази*, orders of ministries *накази*. The formula *Верховна Рада України постановляє:* is *The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine hereby resolves:*; *Закон набирає чинності з дня, наступного за днем його опублікування* is *This Law shall enter into force on the day following its publication*. Ukrainian law is civil law, so its concepts (*нотаріус*, *позовна давність* "limitation period", *юридична особа* "legal entity") have French equivalents more readily than English ones (*notaire*, *prescription*, *personne morale*).
- **EU approximation.** Ukrainian translations of EU acts use established terms (*держава-член*, *компетентний орган*, *регламент*, *директива*, *імплементаційний акт*); when translating them back into English or French, use the EU's own text, not a back-translation.
- **Administration.** *Громада* (territorial community, *hromada*), *ЦНАП* (administrative service centre), *ОВА* (regional military administration, since 2022), *ДСНС* (State Emergency Service), *ЗСУ* (Armed Forces of Ukraine): expand at first mention, with the abbreviation kept.
- **Medicine.** *Лікар* (doctor), *сімейний лікар* (GP), *рецепт* (prescription), *інструкція для медичного застосування* (package leaflet), *протипоказання* (contraindications); abbreviations *АТ* (blood pressure), *ІМ* (myocardial infarction), *ГРВІ* (acute respiratory viral infection, a very common Ukrainian diagnosis with no exact English equivalent: *a common cold* or *an upper respiratory infection*).
- **War reporting.** Since 2022 Ukrainian news uses fixed terms and some slang: *окупанти*, *рашисти* (a political neologism, keep its charge or explain it), *повітряна тривога* (air-raid alert), *укриття* (shelter), *приліт* ("an impact", a strike landing), *бавовна* (ironic "cotton" for an explosion in occupied territory). The register and stance of each word must be kept or explained, not neutralised silently.
- **IT.** Ukrainian IT terms are a mix of settled native words (*файл*, *папка*, *завантажити*, *налаштування*, *застосунок* "app") and borrowings (*гаджет*, *смартфон*, *хештег*/*гештег*); *застосунок* has largely replaced *додаток* for "app" in official and careful use.

## 12. Surzhyk in practice: three cases

**Case 1: a news interview.** A villager on television: *Ну шо вам сказать, всьо побило, хата пуста, а жить треба.* The facts: everything was destroyed, the house is empty, life must go on. The function of the surzhyk here is incidental: this is how the speaker talks.

- English (news subtitles): *Well, what can I say, everything's smashed, the house is empty, but you've got to go on living.* Plain colloquial English; no attempt to mark the variety.
- French: *Que voulez-vous que je vous dise, tout est détruit, la maison est vide, mais faut bien vivre.* Spoken French (*faut bien*) carries the everyday voice.

**Case 2: a character in a novel.** A small-town aunt who speaks surzhyk to her niece, who answers in standard Ukrainian; the contrast is part of the story. Signal it: the aunt's English is colloquial and slightly non-standard (*I says to her*, *them pierogi*, *ain't nobody*) at low density; the niece's is standard; a translator's note in the front matter may name the variety. Do not give the aunt an Irish or a Southern US voice.

**Case 3: a comic song persona.** A pop or comic song in surzhyk whose humour is the mixing. A singable English or French version keeps the comic, warm, provincial persona by the target's comic song grammar, and may keep a few untranslated items (*шо*, *канєшно*) whose meaning the context makes clear; a gloss for a booklet translates the meaning and notes the mixing.

In all three cases the translator decides the **function** of the surzhyk first (incidental, characterising, the point itself) and chooses the target delta by it (general manual §3.7).

## 13. Historical and diaspora orthographies

Ukrainian sources come in several spellings, and a translator must read them, not correct them:

- **The 1905 spelling** of the Kulish/Puluj Bible (§10.3) and of much 19th-century Galician printing: *сьвіт*, *ся* apart, *ї* after consonants.
- **The 1928 (Kharkiv) orthography**, kept in diaspora publications after it was abolished in Soviet Ukraine in 1933: *Ґ* in foreign words (*Ґете*), soft *ль* in foreign words (*кляса*, *Плятон*), genitive *-и* in feminine nouns of the third declension (*радости*), *ав* / *ев* for Greek *au*, *eu*, *т* for Greek *θ* (*катедра*, *Атени*). The 2019 orthography readmitted several of these as variants (*Ґете*, *катедра*, *радости*) *(ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019)*.
- **Soviet-era texts** (1933–1990) follow the 1933 and 1960 orthographies, closer to Russian in foreign words.

A spelling is not a register by itself, but it dates and places a text: a diaspora newspaper of the 1960s in the Kharkiv spelling, a Soviet textbook in the 1960 one. Keep the information in a note when it matters (historical and scholarly translation); ignore it otherwise.

## 14. How Mova handles it

**Today.** Mova does not read or translate Ukrainian. There is no Ukrainian parser baseline, no Ukrainian treebank in Mova's data (UD Ukrainian IU and the ParlaMint treebank exist upstream; their licences are to be checked before use), and no Ukrainian lexicon. English–Ukrainian and French–Ukrainian parallel corpora were built on 2026-11-06 with [tools/parallel](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/parallel/): Tatoeba EN–UK (217 646 pairs) and FR–UK (34 310 pairs), CC BY 2.0 FR with authors, and the Kulish/Puluj Bible (1905, public domain) verse-aligned to the WEB (29 655 verses), the KJV (29 709) and Louis Segond (28 433). What exists is in the Research library: the 2019 orthography (an official document, not protected by copyright), the public-domain grammars of Simovych (1919) and Smerechynskyi (1932) and Syniavskyi's practical guide (1922), and open papers on Ukrainian NLP cited here. The Ukrainian Wikisource dump is held among Mova's raw data. [tools/translate](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/translate/)'s design shows how a Ukrainian reader would plug in: its own world from its own parse, read into the meta-world on aligned pairs (IBM Model 1, `ibm.rs`), as the Hebrew reader is learned (`hebrew.rs`); aspect, case and dropped subjects would be read from the tree's features, as the Hebrew reader reads MACULA's features.

**Planned and being built.** The **Ukrainian Nightingale** 🐦 (tools/nightingale, being built; one per language, under the Eel, with its own Sol consultant) would build a naturalness model of Ukrainian from the Ukrainian Wikipedia (to be fetched) on the CPU. For translation **from** Ukrainian, its role is to place a source on the register map: a sentence far from encyclopaedic Ukrainian, with Russian items in Ukrainian grammar, is a candidate for colloquial speech or surzhyk, to be confirmed by the features of §3.5. The Eel's round `tr-uk-en` (being built) needs a parallel corpus first.

**Where Mova stops.** Everything in this manual is for human translators and for Mova's future Ukrainian reader; no point is implemented.

## Sources

Ukrainian norms and grammars (official or public domain): *(ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019)*; *(smerechynskyi-1932)*; Syniavskyi 1922 *(syniavskyi-1922-poradnyk-ukrainskoi-movy-praktychnyi)*; Simovych 1919. Open research: *(hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive)*, *(hentschel-2022-black-sea-surzhyk)*, *(hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon)*, *(kanishcheva-2023-parliamentary-code-switching-corpus-bilingualism)*, *(fellerer-2022-pro-drop-sw)*, *(shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian)*, *(starko-2025-dictionary-derussification)*, *(synchak-2023-military-feminine)*, *(petruniv-2026-simidioms-corpus-benchmark-ukrainian-idiom)*; *(commission-1982)* for romanisation. Muysken 2000 is cited through Hentschel. Corpus examples: Tatoeba EN–UK and FR–UK (CC BY 2.0 FR), the Kulish/Puluj Bible (1905, public domain).

*The Elamur team*

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