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Keep Calm and Check the HSE Style Guide
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As the year comes to a close, many HSE departments are refreshing their websites, including the English-language ones. How should punctuation be used correctly, and how should university-specific terms be translated for the international version of the site? What are the standards for preparing texts for HSE’s English-language portal? How should abbreviations, capital letters, and forms of address be used? The updated Style Guide—revised this year and now available in both Russian and English—helps answer these questions.
The HSE Style Guide has existed for many years and is maintained by the team responsible for developing and supporting the English-language version of the portal, with the involvement of professional editors who are native speakers of English. The guide contains the portal’s accepted standards for punctuation and spelling, transliteration, the formatting of dates and times, lists and references, the use of capital letters and italics, inclusive language, and the specific spelling of certain terms and job titles, among other things.
Chief Editor of the HSE English Website Support Unit
In 2025, we updated the guide to reflect the realities of a changing language, as well as the most common difficulties and questions raised by users. We also translated the guide into Russian (it previously existed only in English) to make it more accessible to a wider audience of our staff.
Director of the HSE Centre for International Faculty Support
Our colleagues have done an enormous amount of work, systematising the material and presenting it in a clear and user-friendly form. The HSE Style Guide, which is publicly available, allows anyone to consult it at any time and also serves as an authoritative reference in disputed cases—from business correspondence to the website and the presentation of official information.
Leading Specialist of the Centre of International Education at the HSE–St Petersburg International Office
When I first started working with HSE’s English-language materials, the guide was a real lifeline for me. Now I do many things reflexively, but I still return to it from time to time. The guide helps maintain a consistent style and terminology across all pages of the website, which is especially important for large projects involving various authors and translators. I appreciate how the guide helps uphold a unified university style. This greatly improves the quality of English-language materials.
Associate Professor of the HSE School of Foreign Languages
For the past three years, I have been supervising the project work of students enrolled in the Bachelor’s in Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication. As part of their projects, students often work on translating content for our university’s website.
As a practising translator, it is clear to me that this work requires standardisation—for example, in the translation of unit names and job titles, as well as in the consistent formatting of addresses, dates, and times. It is also important to decide which variety of English we use.
Answers to these and many other questions can be found in the HSE Style Guide and the Glossary. The colleagues who compiled them have done tremendous work, greatly easing the task of translators. The guide has now become even more convenient: it has been expanded with new sections, active links, punctuation rules, and other useful information.
I am convinced that this valuable resource will help us achieve the highest quality of translations, which will certainly improve the experience of international students, colleagues, and partners interacting with the HSE website.
The university also provides an open-access HSE University Glossary to support anyone working on English-language texts.