> does anyone know of a reliable company that I can use that maybe has an English interface?
Speaking about .RU domain registration, here’s the list of all officially accredited registrars in Russian Federation:
http://www.cctld.ru/en/registrators/. I personally have a good experience working with RUCENTER and Garant-Park-Telecom; others are also good and responsible.
> will an English installation be OK for all front-end languages?
I think yes. I use Revolution beta 4 of MODx and have (had really) only 1 i18n-related trouble so far: all the tables in MySQL database with their VARCHAR columns had non-UTF encoding so I had to change it throughout manually. But this might be fault in creating a new DB for MODx installation and not bothering to set charset explicitly. Since then I can store all Russian-language content inside MySQL perfectly through MODX Manager console.
> Are there any design considerations when building a site for a Russian/ Brazilian audience or will we be OK to just translate word for word?
Word by word... You know, I’m now involved in translation of one site from English into Russian. First I tried to do my work literally, that means translate word by word; furthermore it was a kind request of site’s owner. But with more time spending on translation and, more importantly, re-reading what I translated several weeks before I came into conclusion that texts sounds unnaturally to what I used to during all my life (I’m native Russian if you didn’t spot it yet ;-) ). Of course it qualifies me as not so good translator and linguist. I had to recompose phrases here and there until I’m satisfied with the result.
So my best suggestion for you is to find Russian who can freely read *and understand* common English plus UK words and phrases, and hire him/her the for the job. This way you’ll sure get very high quality content which is understood well by target audience.
