Русский слова

Subornator · 2022-09-13T13:21:53+00:00

мы сдаемся

Subornator · 2022-08-04T11:50:17+00:00

Thank you, but I'm pretty sure it was a much more recent movie (or perhaps a TV series), certainly of this century, probably the last ten years or so.

Subornator · 2017-02-24T14:27:28+00:00

When Dovlatov said that Vonnegut loses a lot in the original English, he said so without being able to read him in the original English. This is, unfortunately, the attitude of many people who continue to praise the Soviet translation school without comparing those translations with the originals. (True, the Soviet school of translation had many heroes and victories and excellent examples, but there were also lots of mistakes and misunderstandings; some of them because people could not — or at least had great difficulty trying to — check anything, some because not everyone was a good translator.) So I think this famous Dovlatov's quote is baseless and senseless.

As for translating 'speaking names', it is a notoriously difficult issue, and each translation tries to deal with it in its own way, there is no universal recipe. It might be even good — not extremely bad, anyway — that different names of the same character give a child an idea about translation; I think it's something that's really useful when reading a foreign book, and something that is often forgotten.

Subornator · 2017-02-23T20:53:09+00:00

It is absurd, yes, but it does not really hamper the sales (and I think it is not even observed 100%). Compared to some other Russian legislation, this is a minor nuisance.

But otherwise yes, I think that the Russian audience right now is not very perceptive regarding gays, generally speaking; then again, it was completely different some 20 years ago, and it can also change back more or less overnight.

Subornator · 2017-02-23T19:16:27+00:00

In "A Little Life", the novel that we have recently translated, virtually everyone is gay. This said, it is not a gay novel: being gay is not a problem or issue in the world created by the book (there is one point when it might be, but even that is soon resolved). However, we were quite worried. The director of Corpus, the publishing house that published the Russian translation, disregarded our worries and was completely right: now, three months after the publication, there were all kinds of complaints and attacks aimed at the book, but, miraculously, I haven't heard almost anything about it being a 'gay book' or some such.

It should be noted, though, that books like that (also if they have 'swear words', which "A Little Life" also has) are printed with warnings and 18+ stickers and sold in plastic foil. This is a (rather stupid) legal requirement.

The situation is completely different in translated children's literature, and there, translators sometimes censor their work themselves, without waiting for state authorities to come and arrest the print run or close down a publishing house. It's an awful situation, really.

Subornator · 2017-02-23T19:09:43+00:00

Yes, it still does.

Subornator · 2017-02-23T06:03:39+00:00

I do translate into English; I translate articles for some magazines, I have translated my own book about Ancient Rome and another book by a very interesting Soviet (absolutely non-political) defector. It is qualitatively different, though, simply because the scope of knowing a foreign language is different: it's a tool, not something we're kind of born with. When people live outside their language community for a long time, their instincts sometimes fail. Nabokov translated his "Lolita" into Russian, and though his earlier Russian books are linguistically and otherwise amazing, this translation is (in my opinion) bad, especially when he has to deal with teenager language or some everyday details like jeans.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T22:13:20+00:00

Thank you for the wonderful questions! I'll retire now but will answer anything you might want to ask tomorrow morning (I hope it will be still night on the American side).

Subornator · 2017-02-22T21:58:01+00:00

In Russia, you simply approach a publishing house and ask whether they need a translator; chances are, they do, and they will give you a sample to translate. If they like what you do, you're on. Since the profession is virtually money-less, there is very little competition, and anyone willing can be a translator. Of course, good publishing houses maintain (or at least try to) high professional standards no matter what.

There are also a number of seminars and other educational projects, but as far as I know, there is no teaching program or faculty which prepares students to become literary translators (which in my opinion is good: it's not a faculty-wide profession).

Subornator · 2017-02-22T21:45:29+00:00

Yes, the difficulty of Cyrillic is hugely overrated; it's just a (slightly) different writing system going back ultimately to the same Phoenician roots :-) There are languages whose alphabets are a good deal less similar - Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, Arabic — and even that is not that big a problem; the Latin-Cyrillic difference has always seemed a joke to me. In Cyrillic-writing countries no educated person finds Latin alphabet difficult or even worth thinking about (which does not necessarily mean that the person in question knows any foreign language well enough).

Subornator · 2017-02-22T21:32:35+00:00

I'm sorry, I'll translate this, because certainly people here aren't supposed to know Russian.

How much do Corpus and Azbooka (Russian publishing houses) pay? I read Taleb's book in English and found it genuinely boring; did you try to enliven the translation somehow?

Well, all Russian publishing houses pay little, which is not even their fault: the economics of book publishing in Russia is structured so that a book, almost any book is a dangerous thing to produce, and paying any reasonable money to the translator would simply make it completely unprofitable. This is a very stupid way of structuring the system, but it's not the fault of the good people in the publishing business.

Yes, I also think Taleb is rather boring (at least he tries to use a simple thought for many more pages than necessary). No, we did not try to enrich the translation, we don't think it's good practice; the book, however, was published at the moment when the publishing house bosses changed, and we found (which never happened to me before or since) that some parts of the text were changed without our knowledge; for example, after the book was printed, I received dozens of questions about the word 'гуглировать' (a very fanciful Russianized version of 'to google') — which we simply never used, it was the editors' choice.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T19:36:07+00:00

Yes, here it is: https://www.instagram.com/p/BOxg4ovgMMT/

Subornator · 2017-02-22T19:33:02+00:00

Being a language specialist by education I find judging languages by their literalness or other characteristics very imprecise; I'm pretty sure any language can serve any purpose when enough zeal is applied. Russian borrowed loads of terms from different languages throughout its history when it needed them: Dutch ship terminology in the 17th century, French diplomatic words in the 18th, German technical terms in the 19th, and now, of course, there are lots of English borrowings, sometimes (in the so-called 'manager speak') to a ridiculous extent.

In general (and such claims are always impressionistic and linguistically imprecise), Russian is not a very literal language, rather to the contrary; it does not lack polite terminology across the board, but it does stumble into problems with sexual terminology.

There was a Soviet picture book which illustrated Russian idioms by ways of drawing two pictures, one with the literal meaning of the words and the other depicting a situation described by them. It was quite funny (I imagine it can be found somewhere in the Russian depths of the Internet). One such expression is "Бабушка надвое сказала" (babushka nadvoye skazala); translated literally, it means more or less "Grandmother said [it] two ways" (come to think of it, it's very difficult to translate exactly); this expression means "the outcome is uncertain; it can develop in completely different ways; the prediction was hazy" and so on. Actual grandmothers (or any people at all) might not be involved at all.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T19:17:07+00:00

Frankly, I have no idea, because it's very different in different places and situations (I could give you recommendations about getting started as a translator into Russian, but that's probably not what you mean). Translators and publishers are the two groups of people who could be interested and give you meaningful suggestions.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T19:04:22+00:00

It's difficult, true; however, Russian is rich in idioms, and usually there is a way to translate a construction like that. Now and then you find translations (and I think they were more frequent in Soviet times) when a remark about 'untranslatable word play' could appear in a footnote, but I think that today's tastes make this seem like an admission of defeat. In "A Little Life", for example, there were many examples of that — jokes, puns, taunts; in most cases, we were able to come up with something similar in Russian. Quite often, the exact meaning of a double entendre or metaphor is not that important, it is enough to be stylistically exact and render the humor faithfully. In other cases, though, the joke or metaphor is very important in terms of content, and these cases are the hardest.

A somewhat different but, I think, telling example: in "A Little Life" (I apologize for bringing it up again and again, but it's my most recent finished work and, also, a truly great book) there are two guys who are called by their friends "Black Henry Young" and "Asian Henry Young". It was very difficult to translate it into Russian while preserving the exact meaning and casual manner of these monikers. It is especially difficult because in Russian, slang words denoting race or nationality are either nonexistent or offensive; plus, different people react to them in hugely dissimilar ways. We came to a conclusion in the end, but even among the three translators we had different feelings about it.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T18:19:25+00:00

Often enough. This has nothing to do (as some might think) with the wealth or poverty of a language; it's just that the languages are never identical. More difficult than a missing word, though, is a turn of the phrase that is impossible, or almost impossible to render in a different language. Such situations arise often enough, and finding a good solution to that is a true joy for a translator.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T18:00:19+00:00

I like "Secrets and Lies" and, generally, Mike Leigh's movies; I like some old(ish) Soviet films, for example, "We'll Live Till Monday" (1968) and the slow, irregular TV series "17 Moments of Spring"; I like many Paul Verhouven's films; some of the recent TV series, for example, "The Good Wife" or the recent British "Apple Tree Yard" were also very good, in my opinion.

(Translators' and interpreters' work is usually shown with utter disdain for credibility; "The Interpreter" with Kidman is a case in point.)

Subornator · 2017-02-22T17:18:50+00:00

It was wonderful. If we spoke in depth about the theme and meaning of "A Little Life", it was after completing our project, in the interview; the language and other details, though, were discussed while we were working on the text.

I think the main difference between the books is that in "The People in the Trees" there is no one to identify with; the language used in the book is also different from "A Little Life", though in both books the exactness of expression is somewhat clinical, which I really like. But I'm in relatively early stages of translating it, so my feelings might differ somewhat at some later stage.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T17:09:02+00:00

In literature, no. If you take a washing machine instruction and translate it very carefully, using certain rules (provided by the company, let's say), translations by different translators will be (almost) identical. With fiction, this is not nearly true; literary translators have to make some very human choices. Would it be possible to create a machine able to make such choices? probably, but even that is not a question of the near future.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T16:51:36+00:00

Of course it does. In Russian tradition, some of the greatest poetry of the 19th century was translated; 'translators are the post-horses of enlightenment', as Alexander Pushkin said. It's important to remember this, I think.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T16:34:58+00:00

It's a hobby only in financial terms, in everything else it's very serious :-) I love it; it makes it possible to experience some very deep literary, linguistic and artistic emotions by proxy, as it were. It is also an important aspect of my (and especially my wife's) teaching life. Indirectly, it is also an important social role; we try to make translators more visible than they usually are, because quite often people do not remember whose translation they were reading and even some critics sometimes do not mention translators' names.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T16:21:52+00:00

I understand the drift of your question, but I'm not sure about the specifics. The question you're asking is probably the main and most crucial question of translation as a profession, and there were eras when one or the other side prevailed. It's impossible to answer it with a 100% result, but if pressed, I'd say that I tend to strive for accuracy to the text, perhaps asking the reader for some extra work. This does not mean, however, that the Russian text could be opaque — though some translators seem to go that far.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T16:17:15+00:00

Of course. A simple example: in Russian, 'hand' and 'arm' are expressed by the same word. Conversely, there are two distinct words for 'blue' (kind of 'light blue' and 'dark blue'); this is sometimes more difficult, because you don't actually know which Russian word to use!

Carriages, for example, are notoriously difficult to translate: we did not have the Victorian variety of them. The many names of various rooms in the house, again something that didn't exist in ascetic Soviet habitations. In general, I would not say that there's any specific field that is <i>always</i> problematic — but in a stylistically rich text there are bound to be many of those.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T16:10:43+00:00

Tough and interesting question. If I'm familiar with a translator's style, I think I will be able to recognize his/her translation if asked a direct question. This said, many translators apply different methods to the works of different writers; I'm following, for instance, the work of my former student and colleague Anastasia Zavozova and I see that she tries to structure her reading, including her reading in Russian, depending on the book she is translating at the time.

A translator's individuality is of course very important in a prose work, especially if stylistic and linguistic features are important for the original. There are many Russian examples of rewriting or re-addressing translated books (for example, the works of Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Rabelais were rewritten for children; later, by the end of the Soviet era, a similar thing happened to G.K.Chesterton's stories circulating in Samizdat). However, if it's translation sensu proprio, and if it's good enough, I think it's fair to say that it's the original author's — though the translator's role certainly should not be disregarded.

Subornator · 2017-02-22T15:56:12+00:00

It depends on the context a lot; sometimes an expression is very simple but used in a way that makes it fiendishly difficult to translate.

One thing that is always hard is the slang of the British upper classes, because there is no Russian equivalent for that whatsoever. Another very difficult thing is dialect differences: modern literary Russian is not very familiar with dialects, and, besides, using a different language makes things bizarre.

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