Another Day/Another Dollar

"Чим платити?" written on the billing invoice above is in Ukrainian. Although I don't speak it, the language itself is very similar to Russian, and I'm pretty sure it means "What are we paying for?" considering the article I nicked it from is about tariffs in Kiev.

It applies to my post rather neatly as , when I examined my own utility bill - known as "коммунальные услуги" (kommunaliye ooslooghee lit. "communal services") in Russian - there exists (next to the usual electricity, gas, central heating, telephone and hot water) the entry "радио" (lit. radio).

I was puzzled at first what this radio entry meant. Was it something to do with owning an actual radio like a TV license in the UK? I was mildly pissed off at first, considering I didn't have a radio initially, though I then bought a CD/MP3/Radio combo thing (which has since turned out to be a total piece of shit, prompting me to spend some 30,000 roubles - approx. 600 quid - in total on a desktop computer, but the radio still works) meaning I didn't really have any legal ground to stand on. And it's only about 38 roubles a month anyway - just over a dollar at the current exchange rate, or about 80 pence - and I don't handle my bills either (all inclusive in the rent), so I just forgot about it. Until a week ago.

In my monthly shelling out of rent to my (genuinely helpful) landlord and former engineer Giorgy, I handed over the usual scrap of paper that this time round had been obnoxiously stuck into my door handle - a technique usually reserved for pizza delivery employees - rather than slotted into my post box and, out of curiosity, asked what this radio payment actually was.

Turns out this "radio" is a leftover of mid-Soviet times, whereby nearly every apartment in built-up cities were equipped with essentially a direct line to the police for purposes of either asking for assistance, or informing on your dissident liberal neighbors. When Giorgy bought the actual flat back in the 80s, it was no longer there, yet it was still coming in on the utility bill (though back then all sorts of stuff was subsidized by the state).

So what's the big deal with this radio thing anyway? Well, put it this way: there are about 15 million people living in Moscow (legally, the actual number is higher). Granted there are not 15 million households, so let's say there are about four people on average to each residence, give or take an extra million depending on who has actually applied to get the radio thing taken off their bill. That leaves us with... umm... 3 million or so. So that's 3 million dollars a month to the state for a redundant service. Nice way to line the coffers, eh?

I don't think it's so much a case of corruption, more a catastrophic example of no one wanting to deal with the bureaucracy of the matter, so it will take nothing short of a violent coup to remove the damn thing for good.

One more thing to note on the bill, which is far less obvious as maybe not many people can actually visualize it, is not the cost of the hot water, but the actual amount you're paying for. The set amount per household (or flat, more accurately) is something like 5-6 cubic meters a month for just the hot water alone. I can't really visualize it either, but according to Giorgy (again, engineer, so he knows these things) it's an enormous amount, almost 3 or 4 times than the amount you'll ever use.

The upshot is Giorgy is endeavoring to adjust the tariffs appropriately using some sort of device for the hot water, but of course that means filling out several forms and asking some guy to come around with a meter and examine everything, then fill out some more forms.

Reasons #1-370 not to drive in Moscow

Okay I'm giving myself away here a little by showing these, but here's two crappy pics from my crappy Nokia. Just in case you're wondering how bad the capital's traffic can get. Note that this is only the traffic going in one direction.

(The chief reason is due to roadworks further up the road. That traffic shown is far from the worst.)

Fast Food Nation

Since arriving here in Moscow many moons ago to work professionally (rather than farting around as a hapless student or sightseeing prior to that), I've taken my first ever vacation. More of a stay-cation to be exact, but a holiday all the same. Frankly, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to do so, as the Russian system of actually taking a holiday (regardless of company - they all have to conform to Russia's Трудовой Кодекс Trudovoi Codex, lit. Work Codex) involves running between various offices, signing different forms, then returning a few weeks later to sign yet another form. By that point you wonder whether or not it's all worth the effort in doing so. But it is, to some extent, because you get to go and stuff your face with food from Moscow's street stalls more than you would were you at work.

Moscow possesses some of the most brilliant fast food outlets I've ever had the pleasure of frequenting. Before coming to Moscow I lived in Glasgow, which is known for its deep-frying of anything remotely edible (Mars bars, pizzas, ice cream) and, while tasty, you wouldn't really want to live off it for an extended period of time. But not in Moscow. So, in no particular order, I shall expose some of them to you:

Крошка Картошка (Kroshka Kartoshka - something along the lines of 'Munchkin Potato')

Let me go on the record now by saying this: I fucking love Kroshka Kartoshka. I'd have a picture of me hugging one of these things, were it not for the fact that my mobile phone has a very poor camera, and convincing a Muscovite passerby to photograph me doing so isn't an option either. So why's it so fucking good? They sell baked potatoes. I know of only one other outlet in the world that does the same, and that's Spud's on Bradbury Place in Belfast, which is a rather dingy little establishment and one that is especially grimey on a Saturday night.

The potatoes are gorgeous, mostly due to the fact that they've been baking for a couple of hours already and they then slather them with butter and cheese, but it doesn't end there. Like some perverted ice cream stand, they have tubs of various ingredients that you can add as toppings (and they actually use the ice cream scoop things, bizarrely). It ranges from simply extra cheese, various salads, and bits of fried bacon and onion, to incomprehensible additions like salmon and downright revolting crabmeat mayonnaise. They serve toasties too, which are yum as well, but the potato is enough on its own.

The Kroshka stands are all over the place in Moscow, as well as in the major department stores.

Теремок (Teremok, the name is taken from терем some sort of reference to a traditional boyar type of raised household in the countryside which people lived in many moons ago)

Teremok, contrary to Kroshka, deals with pancakes (or blinis, to be accurate). Much like with Kroshka, there are a variety of toppings. I'm a ham n' cheese man, but you can stick in chocolate and banana, or red caviar and cream if you're of the crabmeat mayonnaise mindset. They sell their own brand of квас (Kvass - a drink made from fermented rye bread. Ever-so-slightly alcoholic, but you'd have to pound away about 3 litres of the stuff to get the same buzz as a pint), which also goes down well.

Шаурма (Shwarma - a type of kebab, moreorless)

Not a chain of food stands per se, nor to my taste either, but it's a staple of Moscow so it merits attention. Shwarma is essentially a donner kebab, but wrapped up in an unleavened bread thing to resemble a sausage roll. Not sure of the meat's origins, which is why I tend to stray from them. Like with kebabs, however, you only eat them when you're hammered.

I've drawn a blank right now. There used to be a lot more of these food kiosks a few years ago. For example Rickshaw Ivan's, which was pre-prepared faux Chinese gunk heated up from frozen in a microwave, and Cono-Pizza, which was essentially pizza in an ice cream cone (and surprisingly tasty). I assume the economic crisis has played its part, or because nutjob Mayor Luzhkov - who, allegedly, has also put forward plans to stop snow from falling in Moscow this winter through cloud dispersal, which is mind-boggingly insane and I'm hoping he's finally kicked out of office - cleared a lot of them off the streets because they didn't pay the necessary gratuity to line his pockets with ivory or something, and it's only recently that I have seen some Kroshkas and Teremoks reappearing near to their old haunts.

There is a Kroshka wannabee, called Чудо Картошка (Chudo Kartoshka - lit. Wonder Potato), that appeared, but their quality is inferior and they're not so widespread. In addition to those, there are plenty of general kiosks that sell basic stuff (fags, booze, chewing gum, candy, fruit n' veg and so forth, though not all in one), but they blend into the Moscow scenery, rather than stick out obnoxiously like Kroshka and Teremok.

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In other news, I joined the wandering prat brigade by carrying around a large teddybear inside a cardboard 'house' that I bought from a store called "Build a Bear" (I think it's just the same as the Bear Factory in the UK) for my friend to whom I had lost a bet three years ago. It's alright being stared at by folk on the metro, not so much when it's grotty children who smell really bad, trying to sidle as close as possible to me to get a look at what I'm carrying.

5-minute cop out from updating

Just discovered a little gem through Everlasting Blort called "Slow Moscow". It captures the somewhat sinister side to Moscow, but the city's a great place to live in all the same. Try and name those places...

I've been on holiday the past month, which explains the lack of creative writing, but there is a new entry coming. Wasting too much time resizing the pictures to make it look nice and even. I got a taste for graphic design and layout working at Glasgow Uni's student newspaper, so I don't like things looking haphazard and messy.

Rolling with the punches

Taking a break from linguistic slamming for the moment. I am trying to list some of my translating methods, but it has become so routine for me that I've been too lazy to write them down. So, for some inexplicable reason, I'm going to attempt writing on something I normally wouldn't - boxing.

The reason for this is that one particular individual keeps turning up in the sports section - Nikolai Valuev. Valuev is a boxer. Valuev couldn't be anything other than a boxer. Just look at him.

This man is quite literally built like a brick shithouse, there is simply no other way of describing him. He weighs over 320 pounds and is about 7 feet tall. Hopefully this pic can give you a sense of the scale of the man. This is him fighting John Ruiz for the WBA heavyweight title in 2005.

So why am I bothering to write about him? Well, I guess he's kind of an anomaly in the boxing world. He does have the typical scandal surrounding him - for example, he once picked up a security guard with one hand and hammered him a few times with the other for insulting his wife over her car-parking abilities (allegedly) which led to court action - but there are also his activities outside the ring, which just come off as plain bizarre. He recently defended his diploma on sports psychology, principally the effects on men and women practicing boxing training, successfully at a St. Petersburg university.

In addition to being an intellectual of sorts, he also has a sensitive, artistic side. He wooed his wife with poetry he wrote before proposing, and he's starred in a couple of films. The most well known is Каменная Башка (Kamennaya Bashka lit. "Stonehead") in which he plays a boxer who has lost his memory. Deep stuff, but all respect to him - at least he isn't biting people's ears off (Tyson), or stating that "if we were in prison I would make you my bitch" (Mayweather), or threatening to kill your family (too many to list).

So why even mention him? Well, in his professional career he has lost only once, and it was on points to Ruslan Chagaev, an Uzbek fellow who was the so-called "champion in recess" but shortly after his fight had to retire because he completely tore his Achilles tendon. Valuev has since regained the title and will be challenged soon by British boxer David Haye (formerly cruiserweight). David Haye believes he can take him because, and I quote, "no one has ever tried to knock him out" - a strategy he hopes will work come November.

But look at him. Look at him. How on earth can anyone knock him out? Can you even blame his opponents for not trying to? You'd need a sledgehammer to make him hit the canvas, and even then it would take a couple of blows. Not surprisingly, Valuev's style is extremely basic: he doesn't bother to dance around the ring much, and his big clumsy swings eventually hit their mark. He has none of the grace of Ali, or the grandeur of De La Hoya. Just a brick shithouse. A freak of nature... but there's a sort of weird charm to him, probably because he's one of the few post-soviet Russian pugilists to make the big time in an honest way, whereas the rest of them fell into disgrace in the nineties and ended up working as thugs for the mafia. That reminds me - the criminal world of Russia is an intriguing one, one which differs from the Cosa Nostra of Sicily, and one which I will touch upon later.

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.

"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).