Case studies / Multilingual portal · 7 languages
A Russian exam, explained in seven languages.
People who come to Russia from Central Asia or Azerbaijan to work — and then to stay — have to pass a state exam: Russian language, history and the basics of law. It’s required for a work patent, temporary residence, a residence permit and citizenship. The client wanted a free trainer for it, surrounded by a portal of practical answers. We built it in seven languages: the exam tasks stay in Russian, as on the real day; the interface and explanations speak the learner’s language.
The problem
An exam in the language you’re still learning.
Getting a work patent, temporary residence, a residence permit or citizenship in Russia means passing a state exam on three subjects: Russian language, history and the basics of law. And the exam is sat in Russian — exactly the language the person preparing for it is still learning.
A trainer that’s only in Russian asks you to understand the explanations in a language you haven’t mastered yet; a trainer that’s fully translated doesn’t get you used to what you’ll face on the day. And around the exam come the practical questions — where to take it, migration registration, paying for the patent, finding work, school for the children, the driving licence — which deserve answers in that same language.
Our answer
Tasks in Russian, everything else in the learner’s language.
For the client we built two things that work together. A free trainer for the three exam subjects, where the task stays in Russian as on the real exam, while the interface and explanations are in the user’s language. And, around it, a practical reference portal, with calculators wherever the answer is a number rather than a description. All of it in seven languages, including Arabic, which reads right to left.
The trainer
It works even when JavaScript doesn’t.
Each question stands on HTML and CSS alone: the answers are ordinary radio buttons and the explanation opens with nothing but CSS. JavaScript adds the timer and the progress bar, but it isn’t essential — if it fails to load, the trainer keeps working. That’s an engineering choice, not a stylistic one: the part that matters doesn’t depend on the part that can break.
Interface and explanations in:
Speaking · speech recognition
You speak, and you see what the machine understood.
You can’t practise speaking with radio buttons. Here the user records the answer right in the browser, and the recording is transcribed by a speech-recognition service running on the project’s own server — not in a third-party cloud. Then the page shows the transcript: “what the machine heard”. For the learner it’s concrete feedback; for the client it means the recordings don’t pass through someone else’s service.
How a speaking exercise works:
The portal around the exam
Practical answers, with the sums already done.
Around the trainer sits a reference portal for everyday life: where to take the exam, migration registration, paying for the patent, work, enrolling children in school, exchanging a driving licence. Where the answer is a number, the page doesn’t describe it — it works it out.
Pick the region and the amount appears already converted at the central-bank rate, in the currency the user knows.
How it’s built
Light, test-checked, ready for Arabic.
No framework: the site is static, generated from Markdown texts by a custom-built Node generator. Pages arrive ready and light — the home page weighs about 27 KB compressed, with the CSS already inside. The dynamic parts live only where they’re needed: the employer area runs on Node with PostgreSQL, and speech recognition is a service of its own.
The rules that matter aren’t left to anyone’s memory: the right-to-left layout and the colour contrast are checked by automated tests, and the site goes live on its own, in Docker, only once the tests have passed. The work ran from 5 to 25 September 2026.
The result
A portal that speaks its users’ language.
on the portal, including Arabic with a right-to-left layout
where the exam is taken, across 100 cities in the “where to take the exam” data
for the compressed home page, CSS included
BUILT BY STUDIO REMARKA FOR THE CLIENT — VERIFIABLE AT sinov.ru
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