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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

A Little Grammar

I don't generally work with translation agencies because the process tends to involve surprises, and I don't mean happy surprises. However, one of my agency clients is a true delight. Russian is their specialty, they provide lots of reference material and they give feedback. Sometimes they even send out little editorial notes to all their translators. I read these notes. Even when they don't relate to anything I'm working on at the time I usually learn something.

Just the other day this turned up in my inbox:

"Please avoid translating the Russian participle in the following instances: проведенная оценка, полученные результаты, выполненные работы, etc. In this case, the participle has a grammatical meaning rather than lexical and is similar to the English definite article."

I chewed on that for a while after breakfast and decided that I like it. Simple and sensible.

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