FAQ

Q: How do I get to see the lyrics?

A: See the little icons?

Just click on any of them and it will take you to the page with lyrics on them. The legend that explains the icons is here:

Icons legend:

/ : Russian or Ukrainian lyrics in cyrillic encoding (UTF-8)
: Transliteration of cyrillic alphabet using latin letters: Russian / Ukrainian
/ : Translation of the lyrics (English, French, etc.)
: Guitar tabs or chords
: Watch the YouTube video

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Q : I see Russian transliterated in many different ways. What's the official one?

A: There is no official way to transliterate Russian, as far as I know. I use the one I'm most familiar with: phonetic transcript table

Here are other ways to transliterate Russian (for English speaking people, of course) that i've found across the web:

Russian Transliteration
Transliteration: Russian
Transliteration of Russian into English

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Q: Your transliteration is all wrong! I speak/learn russian and i can tell!

A: Our transliterations are generated automatically, from a script. So they do not take account of the Russian rules or pronunciation. Thus, some words such as сегодня will come out as "segodnya" instead of the correct "sevodnya". Unfortunately, there isn't much we can do about it, as doing all the transliterations by hand will take a million years and we would rather invest this time in translating songs, compilating infos about musicians, etc. Therefore, you should use those transliterations only as a general guide... listen to the song and you would hear the real pronunciation. Or learn to read cyrillics.. it's not as impossible as it sounds like. :)

Also! You might stumble across awful transliterations were some letters are just wrong, such as "r"s being printed as "p", "V" printed as "B", etc. This happens when the original Russian text had some faux cyrillics in it. If you see such a mistake, please let us know in what song you have seen it at katya ( AT ) russmus.net and we will correct it!

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Q: I can't read Russian text, it just comes out as a bunch of weird symbols.

A: Make sure that the character encoding of your browser is set to Unicode - UTF-8.

You might have to Russify your computer.. here are some helpful links for that:

Cyrillic for Windows and the Internet
Cyrillic for Windows 95/98/ME

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Q: Can I upload music/videos on this site?

A: No, you cannot, not for now anyways. Use the forum to exchange e-mails, ICQ/MSN numbers, etc!

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Q: Can I use the lyrics of any of those songs? Who do I contact for that?

A: All Russian lyrics are copyrighted to their authors. You'd have to contact the band to get their permissions. You can usually do that from their official site. The link to their official site is usually on the band's page.

For English translations: you can use without problem any of mines (katya's) if you include a link back to this site. For translations that aren't mine, contact the translator to ask his/her permission first.

For transliterations: use them if you credit us! :)

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Q: I have something you may want to add to the site (translation, info on a band, a discography of a new band, etc.) Where do I send that to?

A: The fastest and easiest way to submit new material to RussMus is by our Forum. We have a special "Submit" forum for that. Here are some important things to consider:

Before submitting anything, always check that we don't already have that information on the site. If you want to add some piece of info to something we already have, please contact the person who wrote it.

Note that you don't need to submit transliterations, those are generated by a script.

*** Please don't forget to include the original Russian lyrics along with your translation!!

ALSO, when submitting a band's info or a transliteration/guitar tab, please indicate how you want to be credited for your work, if you're not part of our official team list, which you can join anytime as a "helper" if you submit something.

Before submitting a link, make sure that it is appropriate and include a page description, as well as a category in which it will fit. And think about linking back to us, we would appreciate that!

Finally, our team can always decide not to add your submission to the site, if we consider it to be unappropriate. DO NOT SUBMIT TRANSLATIONS MADE BY A AUTOMATIC ONLINE TRANSLATORS. We do have *some* quality standards...

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Q: Can you translate a song for me?

A: Sure can. But please, post your request along with the Russian lyrics (if possible) you want to see translated on the forum, in the "Requests" section.

Note that if you do not submit Russian lyrics with your request, we may never be able to find those lyrics for you and to translate your song.

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Q: I want to join the RussMus team! What do I do?

A: If you want to join our team as a "helper" and submit material once in a while, you can talk to any admin or moderator about that. Visit the "about" page to see the current team. Of course, if you haven't submitted anything yet and we never heard of you from the forum you may want to drop by and say hi first... :)

If you want to become a moderator, you want to talk to an admin about that. We are only looking for mature and dedicated people, usually community members that have been with us for a while and we know we can trust. Remember that this is volunteer work!

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