Caveat Emptor II: The Birthday Chronicles

Having witnessed two non-Russians celebrate their birthdays here in the space of the past month, I thought it would be astute to mention the… peculiarity that Russians perpetuate concerning such an event.

Put gently, the practice is just a matter of good manners on your part. Put plainly, it’s downright mean on the part of everyone else. The chief warning is this: don’t go to a bar or restaurant on your birthday in Russia.

Why, you might ask, would one not want to celebrate their birthday at an eatery? Good food, wine, and company are perfect for such an occasion – so where’s the issue here? The problem is that, once it’s time for all to stumble onwards, you have to pay.

This shock to a Westerner’s system is compounded by the fact that, when Russians actually go out for birthdays, they hunt in packs. The most recent party I was at had least twenty people in attendance. Even though the birthday boy in question was fully versed in Russian culture, he was still not best pleased when the bill came his way.

Oh sure, your guests will bring presents, cards and likely a cake also, but they will drink you out of house and home. So much for being pampered by your nearest and dearest on the one day of the year when it’s all about you.

So where does it come from? Upon consultation with a native, allegedly, after receiving such gifts and enjoying fun times, one should проставиться (pro-stav-it-sya). There’s no real direct translation, though it essentially means one should equal things out. Another example would be that if you have a housewarming or are cooking for people in Russia – you’ll have to clean the dishes (I actually think this one is meaner) while everyone else sits on their behinds drinking the booze you bought for them.

It’s a sort of superstition that is almost reminiscent of the Aztecs, though not so much of the human-sacrifice-so-the-sun-will-rise-again. Put another way, if there’s enjoyment happening, those mysterious Slavic gods of social conscience must be appeased immediately, lest your moments of fleeting pleasure somehow bite you in the ass further down the line.

In other words, if you come to Russia, go to other people’s birthday parties – not your own.

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In other news, well, there is not much excitement. I’m attempting to snap photos here and there and still going to the gym, though not lifting weights and instead running like a pillock on the machines. Russians tend to have a different gym regime to what I’ve seen in the UK, so thankfully the machines are hardly occupied. This is because Russians are big on weights, but are more calisthenics-ish outside of that, in that they will do exaggerated, odd-angled squats, sit ups, abdominal stretches and so forth (rather than cardio, maybe it’s a not-wanting-to-sweat thing). And then they’ll just grab a bar and hang off it for about ten seconds before repeating.

Victory Day (День Победы, Dyen Po-byed-ee) is coming soon, which should be more fun than last year, as it’s the 65^th anniversary of the end of World War II. On that note, I read a magnificent variation on the typical error Russians suffer from when translating into English. Instead of writing the typical “The World War II” (i.e. Russians have a problem with definite articles – the same goes for “The Wall Street” or “The Red Square”), one Russian presented me with the beautiful “World War the Second”.

I was also endlessly amused by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano-glacier thing terrorizing Europe, even more so by the fact that I didn’t hear one news anchor attempt to say its name in full (it’s pronounced “EYE-a-fyat-la-jo-kutl”).

Finally, my hair dryer dramatically gave up the ghost, ending its own life with a crunching noise, but it matters not: it’s warm outside, and that’s where I’m going next…

The (taxi) ride of your life

In trying to drum up something to write about, as I haven't typed anything in a while, I initially thought about writing on the mental and physical effects living abroad can cause. Then, ironically, it turned out to be too depressing and dull to write about, so I've settled to instead talking about a completely unique and life-threatening form of Russian transport - the gypsy cab.

I'm not too sure where the practice originates from. Maybe it stems from the economic hoo-haa of Communist times, combined with the whole 'equality' ideology as well. The basic process is this, and you don't need your phone to call up some pithy taxi company:

1) Go to the side of the road, preferably the busiest;
2) Stick out your hand (this is known as поймать машину poi-i-mat ma-shi-nu lit. catch a car);
3) Watch in amusement as several automobiles, usually the shitty ones, swerve across a few lanes to make it to the kerb;

[What a Moscow taxi maybe should look like, but yours certainly won't.]

4) At this point, carefully open the front passenger door of the first car, lest you break it. Confront the driver brusquely, state where you're going and how much you are going to pay. If he agrees: jump in beside him, as opposed to the back seat and off you go. If not, slam the door in his face and walk to the next one. Eventually, by the third or fourth, you'll get where you want for what you want. Always negotiate a price before getting in, and, although this should go without saying, never get into a car with two people in it.

Now for the ride itself. Quality of conversation - if you choose to have one - can range from simple chit-chat (traffic, weather) to historical debates (life in the Soviet Union) to them spouting racist outbursts. It also depends on whether or not the man (I've hitched a ride on two separate occasions with women, one of which was very manly and didn't charge me a dime, as it was a short journey to the end of a one-way street anyway, the other was a German real estate agent) is drinking stary melnik beer, smoking belamor cigarettes, eating sunflower seeds, or fooling around with his portable DVD player.

None of this is an exaggeration, I've been in a gypsy cab where at least one of these things has occurred. In some occurrences they've been nigh on terrifying. This New Year's drive home at 4am from my friend's flat I will never forget, for instance. I was with a lady friend, and I got the feeling the driver was trying to be the cock of the walk . It had also snowed heavily, so the roads weren't exactly ideal, but the metro was closed for another couple of hours, so death cab it was.

I've never been driven home so fast through so much snow with no real concern on the driver's part. He was doing the usual chit chat, and was on his mobile phone a lot, only pausing in conversation to whip the wheel around corners. Four hundred roubles for the pleasure (about eight quid).

Thankfully, having had a chance encounter with an English person at the airport a while back and sharing a taxi home, I now know that there are many reputable companies. For the expats, here's one called XXL, and you can call them at +74959958294, but you should really only consider them for long distance journeys to the airports. Domodedovo, for instance, is about 50 kilometers away.

Another instance was meeting a Dublin couple on the street a year ago. They had backpacks on, due to take the Transiberian express in a couple of days, and were looking decidedly lost, so my friend and I helped them find the nearby hostel, then went and grabbed a drink in the center to celebrate, only for us to realize later that it was a national holiday and the metro closed early. So we caught a ludicrously small, pathetic looking, clapped-out gypsy cab to squeeze into. My friend and I are desensitized to such things, but upon seeing the faces of the Dubliners halfway through the journey, I realized that the two of them probably won't forget the encounter for some time.

It's snowing a hell of a lot right now. Heaviest in 40 years. Take that, Luzhkov!

Translators Are Traitors pt. II

Lesson time, kiddies, because I'm growing tired of encountering this over the past few years. Specifically, it's limited to Russian to English translating. As for other languages, I can't comment. Romance languages have that irritating habit of sort of sounding like each other and thus don't cause too many problems (what with the same root n'all) for anyone learning Spanish, French and Italian all in one go, but I'm sure common problems occur with all translators/editors and all are driven equally nuts by them.

So here goes. To set a sort of, umm... background thingy... tone. Or mood. Or whatever. For those unaware of who/what I am, outside of studies I have been translating and editing semi-passively for the past three years, and I have picked up a few things that may, at first , be small and mildly insignificant. But small things lead to big problems, and those problems can eventually come back to bite you and everyone above and below you in the ass. I'm not talking on the level of Krushchev's shoe-banging "We will bury you!" incident at the UN, merely professional bits that, frankly, should go completely without saying. Especially with the ludicrous power of the Internet available. The fact that you're reading this and are possibly mildly interested in translating/editing means that you, too, have no excuse for fluffing up your translating skills.

Bear in mind that I'm drawing all this from personal experience, and this is just how I do things, not dogmatic regurtitation from some wanky book on linguistics. The pissed-offness inside me will come and go, so this may be scattered over several posts, depending on the level of bile herein.

So, pray tell, what's the very VERY first basic rule of translating anything, be it a text of a Russian gossip magazine to a press release by an industry magazine to an extract from some book or other? Anyone? No? Four simple words:

Get. Your. Facts. Straight.

This isn't rocket science, unless you're this girl, it's simple common sense. By "get your facts straight", I'm talking about the names of people, titles, organizations, places, and so forth. Proper nouns, more or less. So how do you go about doing this? Well, some of the time, such words won't cause too much grief, as they're already well established and are talked about so much you'd wish they'd shut up. Let's use a pathetically easy example...

In English:
- North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

In French:
- Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord (OTAN)
(And no, in case you were wondering, they weren't being pretentious at those meetings, spelling it backwards and forwards on all the posters)

And in Russian:
- Организация Североатлантического договора (НАТО)
(Organizatsiya Severoatlanticheskovo dogovora NATO)

Okay, so not so hard. All those things translate fairly literally. In Russian, we see, literally translated word-by-word into English, 'Organization of the North Atlantic agreement', yet the acronym still remains НАТО, even though it should technically be something like ОСД because, as we've established, it's so darn well-known that everyone (bar the French) calls it NATO...

...but you'd be surprised! I wrote there 'Organization of the North Atlantic agreement', literally, and - guess what - that's what some excuses for translators will actually write, rather than North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or even NATO! Why? Because they don't take ten seconds (I'm not kidding, that's how quickly this can be done) to double check their efforts.

Let's try something a little harder:

In English:

The United States Department of Defense (sometimes just DoD)

in Russian:

Министерство обороны США (Ministerstvo oborony S-SHA)
also written as
Департамент обороны США (Departament oborony S-SHA)

Here is a slightly less talked about institution, but nigh-on every country has one. In Britain we have the Ministry of Defence, and in Russian it translates to Ministry of Defense too, but (aha!) not in America! America calls their's (theirs? whatever) the Department of Defense (with the American spelling on the s, by the way), even though it deals with the exact same issues as its foreign counterparts. So, while everyone else in the world will be satisfied with the American DoD referred to as the Ministry of Defense, Americans bloody well won't. This instance isn't the biggest crime against communication, but it's the tip of the iceberg.

Now let's draw one from experience, but I'll need another preamble:

More often than not there are direct equivalents between Russian and English phrases like "When pigs fly", the Russian equivalent is "When crabs whistle on the mountains" (which is more evocative than its English counterpart, frankly). Of course, some phrases have no English equivalent because they relate to some weird cultural peculiarity that takes a whole paragraph to explain and by the time you get done with it everyone else has stopped reading.

So getting back on topic. Some Russian journalist in a newspaper a while back, probably in an attempt to be sarcastic, wrote the phrase мозговой штурм (mozgovoi shturm) in Dr. Evil-style finger quotation marks. It wasn't an attempt to introduce a new phrase into the Russian language - like, say, making the word 'Russophobia' or 'reset button' de rigeur - because it's already an extremely well-established set phrase in both English and Russian. Why he/she put it in quotation marks is irrelevant, what matters is that the phrase itself is in quotation marks which, if it hasn't already, should be ringing alarm bells in a translator's head.

Let's break it down first and look at this short phrase literally. Мозговой (mozgovoi) is taken from the noun мозга (mozga) which means brain. By turning it into мозговой, it makes it adjectival, i.e. of the brain - a particular beauty of the Russian language, in that verbs and nouns can be easily turned into adjectives.

[Incidentaly, this noun is masculine despite having a feminine ending.]

Штурм (shturm), following the adjective, is the noun 'assault' or 'storm'. Figured it out yet? What's that word we have in English that contains the words 'brain' and 'storm'? Yep, that's right - brainstorming.

For argument's sake, let's say you have just landed on the planet and aren't that savvy at the English language - how can we go about figuring out what the correct translation into English is for мозговой штурм? What you need are the following, in order of (sequential) importance:

- Google
- Wikipedia
- Multitran
- Lingvo

Non internet thingies:

- MS Word (purely for the semi-helpful grammar correction thing, but we'll focus on the phrase for the moment)

I won't be using all of these for the example, but it'll be relevant later when I come back to do more complex terms.

So here's the order of play: take мозговой штурм and put it inside quotation marks. Putting a phrase in quotation marks in a Google search means that phrase and that phrase alone is searched for, rather than just a bunch of keywords. So, copy and paste

"мозговой штурм"

into Google's search field. You should come up with results like this.

How many results is that? A million in Russian? That's a lot, given that it's just Russian. Methinks we're onto something here.

Now then, what's the very first result on that results page? Is that a Russian Wikipedia entry? Sure looks like it. So click on that.

Right. You're still bamboozled, maybe, because now the title of the article reads 'Метод мозгового штурма' (metod mozgovo sturma), but that's only because it's an incredibly smart redirect by Wikipedia/Google to its proper full term in Russian, as opposed to just мозговой штурм. Here's the last step. Scroll down the left hand side of the Wikipedia entry, and you'll see a list - titled на других языках (na drugikh yizikakh) - of languages that have the respective equivalents of that entry. Hunt for the word 'English' in that list. Click on it and there we have it: the correct entry for мозговой штурм is... brainstorming!

So that's an easy example of how you can figure out certain terms from Russian to English, using just Google and Wikipedia. Once you get used to it, the process takes no longer than half a minute or so, and should prevent you from embarrassing yourself by submitting alternate versions like "storming of minds" or "brain assault". I've spent far too long writing this up, but I'll come back to it later and elaborate on more advanced methods.

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In other news, new first prize for Carrying Random Shit Around Award goes to some confused scraggly-haired man walking down Tverskaya carrying a foot-long scale model Spanish galleon in one hand and a massive shabby rectangular cardboard slung over his opposing shoulder while I was eating sushi in a restaurant a couple of lazy afternoons ago.