Russian Online Translator Learns to Handle Local Idioms
Yandex has introduced a new translation mode designed for complex, long-form texts, promising better context awareness and more accurate, natural wording.
Yandex has launched a new mode in its Translator service aimed at working with longer and more complex texts. The updated approach is designed to preserve context, style, and precision, rather than translating sentence by sentence.
The new mode is built on large language models and targets texts where meaning cannot be reduced to isolated phrases. This includes articles, reviews, literary excerpts, and analytical materials. In these cases, the translator analyzes the entire text to understand context, instead of processing it line by line.
Idioms and Literary Expressions
The difference is especially noticeable in titles and set expressions. For example, the film title Me Before You can be rendered by traditional machine translation as the literal “Me Before You,” which in Russian reads awkwardly as “Ya pered toboy.” In the AI-powered mode, the service takes broader context into account and selects the established Russian title, “Do vstrechi s toboy.” The same approach applies to idioms and literary constructions, helping the system avoid rigid, overly formal language.
Linguists Approve
To assess quality, Yandex involved professional linguists. According to their evaluation, translations produced with large language models are noticeably better in about 80% of cases when applied to complex texts, compared with classic machine translation. The improvement is measured in how well the translation preserves meaning, style, and emphasis from the original.
Style, by Choice
Users can decide how their text is translated. Switching between the AI-powered mode and the classic version is available in a single click below the input field. The new mode is intended for texts where accuracy and natural phrasing matter most, while the classic option remains useful for short, straightforward phrases where speed is the priority.
The AI mode is already available on the Yandex Translator website and in its mobile app. It currently supports major European languages — English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish — for translation to and from Russian. For now, a daily request limit applies to all users to keep the service accessible to a broad audience.
