Duplication of information in English on subway signs will become optional
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The Ministry of Transport cancels the mandatory duplication of information in English on the schemes and signs of the metro, monorail, cable cars and funiculars, the same applies to audio messages, for example, during announcements of stations and stops. The obligation for carriers will be excluded from departmental orders. The agency explains this decision by citizens’ complaints, the “socio-political situation in the country” and the increased “information load on passengers.”
The Ministry of Transport published on regulation.gov.ru a draft of changes to departmental orders regulating the “standard rules” for the use of the subway, monorail, funicular and cable car.
Most of the amendments relate to bringing documents in line with the legislation in the field of transportation, but the norm that changes the rules for “sound and visual” informing passengers is of interest. The carrier today is obliged to duplicate all information on diagrams, signs, inscriptions and when declaring stations in English. The Ministry of Transport proposes to remove this obligation, leaving the decision to the regions, “taking into account the numerous appeals of citizens and subjects, due to the significant information load on passengers and taking into account the socio-political situation” (quote from the explanatory note). The Ministry of Transport did not give additional explanations to Kommersant. As now, it remains possible to duplicate inscriptions and announcements into other languages, taking into account “regional features”: in the Kazan metro, for example, stations are announced in the Tatar language.
Parliamentarians have since last year expressed a variety of ideas to limit the use of the English language. So, in June 2022, the speaker of the Federation Council, Valentina Matviyenko, proposed “taking measures” to combat the excessive use of anglicisms. In April 2023, the deputy Sultan Khamzaev (United Russia) proposed to exclude English from the school curriculum. In May of this year, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin called the English language “dead”.
The subjects of the federation may mistakenly perceive the amendments as “not clearly articulated desire of the authorities” to remove English from all signs and diagrams, Kirill Yankov, head of the Union of Passengers, fears. “They may be afraid to seem politically irresponsible, they will rush one after another to remove English inscriptions even in those places where they are needed,” the expert believes. In his opinion, in Moscow, Vladivostok and other cities where there are still English-speaking tourists, duplication should be left, but in Samara, for example, it is not necessary. He recalled that in 2023 the flow of foreign tourists to the Russian Federation decreased tenfold, and those who continue to come are mainly from the CIS.
“It is necessary to duplicate information only where it is really useful, where there are competent people who can do it competently,” says designer Ilya Birman (designs transport schemes and navigation systems). The creators and designers of schemes (with the exception of Moscow), as a rule, do not understand well how to separate languages so that one does not interfere with the other, the expert believes.
In the metropolitan subway, the MCC, the MCD and the monorail, they stopped declaring stations in English back in 2021, the press service of the Moscow Metro told Kommersant, after a reduction in the number of tourists due to the pandemic, as well as “complaints from passengers for additional information” . “Thus, we have optimized the overall flow of information that passengers receive,” the company explained. “The absence of duplicate information allows you to add additional information to signs, indicate more streets and socially significant objects.” The State Unitary Enterprise drew attention to the fact that changing the rules remains at the discretion of the Moscow government.
The director of the Nizhny Novgorod metro, Oleg Yaushev, noted that none of the Nizhny Novgorod residents complained about the English dubbing in the subway, the company does not plan to remove it. “We made this information system relatively recently, spending a lot of money. Why remove it now? he said. “Tourists who are native speakers of English go to the city. The language is widely spoken, and we are hospitable. Of course, if there is a directive to remove everything and leave only in Russian, we will obey. But it’s not worth getting to insanity.”
“If an order comes out, we will execute it,” Kommersant was also told in Kazan’s Metroelectrotrans, noting that there were no requests from citizens to cancel the duplication of station names in English. Recently, the company updated the plates with the line diagram: they contain the names of the stations in Russian, Tatar, English (small print) languages, the carriages continue to announce stops in three languages. But in Kazan buses have already stopped messages in English. As follows from the message of the Kazan mayor’s office, an agreement with carriers on transport services suggests that the salons should have “speech information about the names of stopping points in two state languages: Tatar and Russian.” English is not included in the contract.
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