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.

=======

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.

"Translators are traitors" (Nabokov)

Been an awfully long time since I bothered posting anything. This is mostly due to the fact that, on some occasions, I'm a boring person. Being an expat, regardless of city, ain't exactly wild times - unless you're one of those annoying students on a year abroad who, in spite of being in a different country, only end up socializing with other annoying international students and guffaw about how wonderful it is to live in Moscow, in spite of the fact that they hardly ever interact with the local population and, in fact, view them as scum (oh wait, covered this subject before, sorry).

In spite of me being boring, it wasn't all slouching on my bed doing nowt. No no no. I'd have much preferred doing that. Just dull nonsense that involved me being sedentary and not making the most of the nice weather. When I did try to make the most of it (on Thursday or Friday of last week, I forget which) I ended up being caught in a tropical downpour.

Turned out a miniature tornado had descended in the North East of the Moscow Region, in a place called Сергиев Посад (Sergiyev Posad), which is one of the Golden Ring towns (churches, toy factory, other touristy traps, not really my thing), and caused a massive rain storm across the entire Moscow area. Indeed in Sergiyev Posad itself the wind was so strong that a kiosk was lifted up off the ground and tossed 30 feet across the road. The woman inside was unhurt, though a little shaken. One wonders why she didn't bother getting out of there in the first place. What didn't make the headlines was that other people did in fact die as aresult of the storm, from car accidents or whatever.

To a much lesser extent I bore the brunt of the weather when I was leaving a Korean restaurant near the river. It looked to be a bit drizzly, and being from Ireland it's no real big deal. But then it got worse. Instead of seeking cover like my restaraunteuring friends, I decided to run for it, as I only lived about ten minutes walk away. What followed was the equivalent of jumping into a river. I've never been soaked so much by rain in my life. Needless to say, Sod's law dictated that moments before reaching my door, it stopped the same way a tap turns off. I literally had to wring some of my clothes out before getting into my flat. Bracing.

Other excitment has been language-y stuff. I began co-teaching a class of students on simultaneous interpretation with an acquaintance who is himself a professional teacher. Although I'm used to doing this kind of stuff before (as well as having a degree in languages), being a native speaker of English (especially UK folk) here is just short of being given a license to print money. If you know the right channels e.g. private lessons, and who to go for i.e. oligarch offspring with more money than braincells, then, well, you can clear up big time, and none of this nonsense like tax either. All cash in hand. Unfortunately I don't have the patience or the will to run around half of Moscow teaching people, but being a helping hand at regular lessons suits me grand.

In addition, rather than actually enjoying my days off and attempting to tan my pathetic pasty Irish skin, I've ended up doing more work editing and translating. The money's good, but if I'm not careful it'll drive me to madness. I don't like translating so much, and I am often appalled by other translators who can't do simple things like form sentences, use articles properly or, and this really gets me every time, get people's names right. The Internet, in spite of being a fountain of pornography, is so ludicrously useful for translators that there is simply no excuse nowadays not to be able to figure out English variants of Russian phrases or vice versa, or the name of the Czech Minister of Transport, or the exact title of some weird institute in Mongolia. Google and Wikipedia alone (disregarding the user-generated content snub) are two incredibly powerful tools for linguists. Throw Lingvo and Multitran into the mix (at least for Russian) and that's it - nothing else needed. Even Google has its own translation feature, which works wonders as well, especially if the material you're working on is already a collage of stuff taken from the net.

Nonetheless, all the translating tools in the world won't help you get your head around overly chirpy biz-speak on the railway infrastructure in Europe, which are usually things like "The two parties congregated to discuss forming an agreement on organizing a joint venture over the planned proposal that was considered in a development meeting last week." Or in other words: "They're gonna work together."

Right now it's пух season (Pookh like 'Loch') which are, umm... poplar seeds I think, but fluffy. It's like a fluffy snowstorm, and is absolute murder for allergy folk and it gets everywhere. Not to be confused with the word пук (Pook) which means fart. Someone who is a farter is a пердунь (Pear-doone).

Today is a momentous occasion (sort of)

Boring title for a post, but my mental capacities are limited on my weeks off work. On saturday I (again) went to Ikea. There's about three in Moscow, and regardless of where you go they are always jammed with horrible people. I managed to cart a table all the way back from a far-off massive shopping centre at Белая Дача (Belaya Dacha which means, umm, white country house, I guess. Bit of a misnomer) in the south-west by myself, both blistering my fingers and looking like a pillock at the same time.

Walking along the Moscow ring road carrying a table top sideways would have turned me into a type of sailboat, meaning I constantly had to attack the wind. So rather than continue my zig-zagging, I ducked down the back streets behind the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on my way home. I didn't dare walk in front of the damn thing, in case one of the blasted militsiya decided to question my strange behaviour.

It's not entirely uncommon for muscovites to be seen carrying random pieces of crap . On the metro you'll run the gamut of mad old ladies with kittens stuffed down their coats to a slightly sheepish young girl carrying an enormous stuffed animal from an unknown fairground, or, my personal favourite, a tramp with a glazed look on his face holding three half-full glass tankards of beer and a half-opened bottle of champagne - all the while acting as if this were the norm, as if he was left at the table while the rest of his mates went outside for a fag.

As a result of my herculean efforts, I now have a proper desk to work from - rather than being hunched over on a crappy bedside table thing - or just eat in front of the comp like a fat slob.

On Sunday I was (sort of) teaching a class with my acquaintance Alex. He already teaches at an institute and asked me to come along and voice some optional classes for extra hard-core interpretation. Essentially it was me talking about myself and them having to interpret back to Alex as succinctly as possible. I rather enjoyed it, as I think that's one of the best possible teaching methods: put the feckless ones on the spot under pressure and see how they perform. Worked for me in my school days, and I lament the fact it didn't continue to uni level. Indeed I got a lot out of yesterday's class myself, as I hardly speak any Russian these days. At uni they made us read numerous works of Russian literature instead. I didn't mind, but it was too much of a roundabout way of learning a language.

Caveat Emptor

I'm at terrible risk of sounding like one of those foreigners that plague Moscow with this post. The Expat stereotype, especially those from England and America, who haven't been here that long, have a dreadful tendency to openly complain about everything here, like the service or food or general quality of anything, despite the fact they don't pay taxes because their multinational employers pay them via their Swiss bank accounts, nor do they even go as far to sample anything Russian (and yes I do pay taxes, unfortunately, quite a hefty sum too because of the whole double taxation bawls). They pay no heed to the axiom "when in Rome..."

In this case, though, I am not so much complaining, but rather warning anyone who comes here expecting anything simple, such as a basic transaction. One shop relatively near to mine (I'm not petty, so I won't point out its exact location via googlemaps just yet) is but one of many 24-hour продукты (Produkti, like the word product with an 'ee' at the end) which are scattered around Moscow, and are exceedingly useful for food, booze, emergency toilet roll (or even all three if you're having a good night) etc...

A scant few outlets let you walk around and pick up your own stuff and proceed to a makeshift till, but god forbid you muss anything up as you meander around the cramped shop. Most of them, however, are over-the-counter style, which create the ideal situation for language students who have studied the necessary vocab, but what that teaching doesn't prepare you for is how vile some of the shop attendants are towards their customers.

I don't give a monkey's about the sub-par service or the relatively-low quality food that is permanently at odds with its price tag. What I do care about, or rather what baffles me constantly, is my constant need to be within approximately ten kopeks of whatever I need to pay for.

The simple idea of a float in a till isn't just limited to the uncouth turnips responsible for the bungalow down the road, it's EVERYWHERE - all the way up to the equivalent of Marks & Spencers, Седьмой Континент (Sedmoi Kontinent - lit. Seventh Continent). I have been refused service on more occasions than I care to remember, simply because I had in my possession more money than was needed, until I coughed up something closer to the sum required.

Think of it this way: you come into the Savoy, or the Ritz or somewhere fancy and you order a cocktail from the bar and halfway through your drink you whip a £50 noteout of your wallet to hand to the well-dressed waiting staff, only for them to say"we can't take that" (I think the phrase in Russian is "не несете" ne nesyote lit. "you don't carry").

What would you do? Kindly root around your pockets for two minutes trying to get the exact amount in musty coins and piss-soaked notes, or would you spit up that half of your drink onto their face in utter disbelief?

I cannot understand what the root of it is. Some places are okay. Ironically another produkti not far from the one I accuse has no such problems with doling out change (and they actually smile because I'm such a regular customer), but it's just that little bit too far away sometimes and my laziness prevents me from venturing that far. So what's their excuse? Does someone come in every day right before I do and pay for chewing gum with a 5000 rouble note (approximately £100)? Do they have a stingy manager lying in the wings who snatches away any and all cash of notable amounts as soon as the till drawer closes? Or do they just not care that I'm trying to not only prolong my existance by eating their sub-par salads, but also to contribute to an economy that is going down the toilet?

Nothing works against them either. You be nice and present the correct change and they stonewall you. You are neutral and they stonewall you. You act as much of a miserable fuck as they do and still nothing happens.

It's just... I just can't get it.

Oh right, yes other news:

- Eurovision tonight, approximately 7PM GMT which is 10PM here
- Gay pride parade was attempted earlier today near the grounds of MGU, only for about 24 people to be strongarmed by the armed forces (both the regular police AND folk called OMON, who are not known for their patience) and viciously heckled by right-wing arseholes claiming to represent the Orthodox Church. Cue footage of a policeman in a big hat smoking a fag dragging a transvestite in a wedding dress by their hair. Mayor Luzhkov, in one of his more diplomatic moods, has referred to the parades as 'satanic' and an abomination.

No one seems to have pointed out to any of these people that Moscow is already hosting the biggest gay parade Europe has ever known and they're paying for it too.

I can't say it about all of my Russian friends, but the ignorant bigotry in this country is staggering.

Hey wait, did I mention that foreigners need to get HIV blood tests every six months?

Hack journalist strikes again

*cough* page 18 *cough* [/shamelesspromo]

Editorial correction

Following the recent post on Moscow's hot water issues Ben has been informed by a Russian friend that the theory about Muscovite plumbers going away on holiday is incorrect. Rather, it is thought that the turning off of the hot water is a way of 'bringing people together', in that old friends will suddenly appear and your neighbours will unexpectedly become less hostile towards you for approximately a two-week period. Ben apologizes for any international language mishaps.

Hot water hydrophobia

At some point (probably right now, if I'm lucky) the hot water in my apartment building will be turned off for about two weeks. I've never figured out the official reason for this, but it might be because the hot water is on CONSTANTLY all year round in every building, meaning they need to shut it off a district at a time to do maintenance. Russians joke that it's because "the plumbers go on holiday."

Those lucky enough to have either water heaters or are going away on holiday won't suffer the bone-chilling misery. I tried to wash during cold-water season on two occasions. It's impossible and it's not character building, though one esoteric character I met put it rather neatly, with something along the lines of "Well, you know, years ago, they never had warm water like today, so I don't see why it's hard," and used it as an obscure form of meditation. He's a good chess player. I also taught him poker.

So abandoning philosophical musings I'll either be reduced to using the kettle and the sink, or just not washing. Hopefully it'll start when I'm not working. On occasion, both the cold and hot water are known to go off completely in the building due to people doing something called Ремонт (Remont, which are repairs, literally, but when applied to apartments it means a complete overhaul). The revolting Soviet-era infrastructure (rusty pipes, bad wiring etc...) and uncomfortable furniture are often swept away in favour of IKEA-esque refinements (Moscow has at least two IKEAs - and a couple of H&Ms, finally), which are usually just as crappy, but do work much better (especially depending on the age of your apartment building i.e. Krushchev-era, Brezhnev-era etc...). Usually when the water goes off like that it's when you're trying to do something important, like flushing your recent contribution to the sewerage system down the loo.

The only other way of avoiding such a fate is get into a disastrous short-term relationship that at least affords you the opportunity of using their hot water. Then just break up once yours comes back on.