These guidelines establish editorial standards for translating and editing news materials from Russian into publishable English content for news agencies, with a specific focus on Uzbekistan and Central Asia.
The main objective is to transform source texts into professional English news reports that adhere to international journalistic standards adopted by major information agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press.
Requirements for Maintaining Source Integrity
Strict adherence to the integrity of the original material is required. All factual information, including names, official titles, geographical names, numerical data, currencies, dates, and quotes, must be preserved without any alterations or additions. Editors must not use external knowledge, historical context, or speculative analysis.
Ambiguous or unclear details in the original source must remain ambiguous in the final English text, rather than being corrected or assumed.
Style Formatting Rules
Style rules mandate compliance with specific formats across all translated materials. Geographical names must conform to established standard spellings; for example, Fergana should be written as Ferghana, and Turkey as Türkiye in standard narrative.
Financial figures must use a standardized format, applying US$ for US dollars and sums or soms for Uzbek currency, while maintaining exact numerical values without currency conversion unless explicitly stated in the source. Dates must consistently be formatted as Day Month Year.
Articles must be structured according to the inverted pyramid model, where the most important news event is placed in the introductory lead paragraph, followed by key supporting facts, contextual information from the source, and background details.
Sentence structure must be reworked into clear and concise English, instead of a literal translation from Russian syntactic structure. All assertions and factual statements must retain their original attribution, maintaining the precise degree of certainty expressed in the source text.