Russian is spoken in many countries outside of Russia.

My former girlfriend is from Estonia and speaks Russian natively.

I have colleagues who are Ukrainian and speak Russian primarily.

Yes it is, but what else is left to protect your software?

Nothing really. Piracy is widespread in my country and a lot of software being pirated isn't translated.

End result? People learned English.

which would be a preferred goal to have? I'm mean, it doesn't hurt to have more russians beeing more capable in english?

You really think a missing translation is going to protect anything? I'm not from Russia, but close enough. We've seen a lot of unofficially translated software (and games) back in the 90s. Some of those translations were really good. And you don't need source code to do it.

Let's rename the language then. From now on, the people in Russia are proud about their language, North East Estonian.

I think if you are to follow that logic, then English should've been long renamed to something else too.

Russians sometimes name Ukrainian "Little Russian". So the newspeak name for Russian could of course be "East Ukrainian" or "Little Ukrainian".

Maybe she should speak Estonian natively.

There are large portions of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania where the mother tongue is Russian. Some folks over 45 may not even speak the local language, and may not need to. Most of the younger people would be bilingual (or more commonly tri), though.

Lots of people in Moldova speak Russian bilingual too. Russian is commonly spoken in Kazakhstan - even Russian courses in the universities.

Overall for many Russian is a decent choice to have a produce localized to or search for information in general. Like in your case - compare it to Estonian where the native speakers are fewer than 1.5 million (even, when you include all age groups) - a lot smaller market, harder to localize due to lack of translators, etc.

There are 10's of millions of primary Russian speakers living outside of Russia. Much more than some Asian, African, and European languages that are regularly translated.

I don't get the downvotes ether.

You've just lost the vast majority of the market who NEED Russian translations to use your software.

I imagine most Russian speakers outside of Russia, who buy software, would also have an least some proficiency in either English, French or another supported language.

Even though I haven't kept up with my French, I could probably manage to use a French version of Windows. It's going to be harder, but not impossible.

> I mean, who would support translations of a language where you're software almost 100% gets pirated.

Language nerds can be as weird/passionate as tech nerds. Plenty of people who will translate things for either language politics reasons (dislike of English as the lingua franca) or for fun.

I don't think there is any reason to believe laws against piracy are effective at reducing piracy. I think the people who paid for Russian language software before will continue doing so as long as they can still make the payment.

If office were not legally available from Microsoft, but was legally available from professional "software distributors" (e.g. crackers) with helpdesk services, then there would definitely be large companies buying MS office from the distributors.

Which they very well may not be able to do at the moment.

I disagree with the downvotes. Your first edit does a lot to clarify your position, but could you expand on it?