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I use Google to translate 2 sentences involving 2 cities (Liman-Лиман, Kamyzyak-Камызяк): 

The distance from Liman to Kamyzyak. 
The distance between Liman and Kamyzyak.

Расстояние от Лиман до Камызяка.
Расстояние между Лиманом и Камызяком.

Google changed the city names to different forms. Is there a way to avoid the name change? I learned Russian in high school and have forgotten 99% what my teacher taught me. Can I make some short cuts to avoid name change? For example:

Расстояние Лиман - Камызяк ...
Расстояние (Лиман - Камызяк) ...
Расстояние: Лиман - Камызяк
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3 Answers 3

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Well, "is it possible" heavily depends on what you actually want to achieve. If you intention is to have some sort of summary data, something like report, then you can go with:

Лиман — Казымяк, расстояние N км

If report-like approach is not an option, to sound natural you still need to know and use cases.

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  • 1
    As a side note on typography, it would be much better with an M-dash instead of a hyphen. A hyphen implies it's a single compound name. Where M-dash is not available, double hyphen may be used instead: Петропавловск-Камчатский -- Москва.
    – ach
    Jan 11, 2018 at 13:27
  • @ach good point, in "paper" typography one definitely needs to do this, in web typography at least spaces will do, that's true.
    – shabunc ♦
    Jan 11, 2018 at 13:30
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You can say:

Лиман и Камызяк <находятся> в N км. друг от друга

находятся can be ommited

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  • это очень хороший вариант!
    – shabunc ♦
    Jan 9, 2018 at 20:20
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Google did the right thing: the change is required for the sentence to be grammatically correct. If you don't apply the change, the generated sentence would sound like "the distance between he and she" instead of the grammatically correct "the distance between him and her".

You can make this change automatically using this web service:

http://ws3.morpher.ru/russian/declension?s=Лиман

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  • I might be wrong, but my understanding is that the author actually understands why this happens, just looking for some options to make thing simpler if possible.
    – shabunc ♦
    Jan 9, 2018 at 11:34
  • @shabunc, you are probably right; I just wanted to question the basis of his decision to "avoid the change" because a grammatically correct sentence is good for both people and search engines. Why take shortcuts when you can do the "right thing"?
    – Sergey Slepov
    Jan 10, 2018 at 5:59

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