i have a copy of neverwinter nights 2 in russian, and i'd like to know if there is a way to patch / mod it to english

Where did you get this copy?

from a russian friend of mine who owed me money but i just decided to settle for a game instead, is there a way i can go about changing the language to english?

If you want to change just the dialogue text it might be possible, but there's no official way of doing it and I don't know how often it's been tried and with what degree of success. Getting everything translated (voicing, etc.) has probably not been attempted and there's no official way to do it either.

i just want to change the text, the menus and etc. how would i do this?

I don't have the game installed right now, but in theory you would just overwrite the dialogue file with the one from the latest English patch... I don't know if you can get the source of the game patches anywhere though as they normally come packed and I don't know if you could force-patch a Russian version of the game to English. This is really purely theoretical...