Language Digger

Flying Carpet

2011-06-02T11:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a closeup of a nice handwoven rug I just bought. I hope you can see the airplanes! Does this make it a ковер-самолет? My son certainly thinks so.

Tired Hands, Reading Backwards

2011-04-03T10:56:00.000-07:00

I love translating, but my hands get very tired most days. Each particular task comes with its own ache - the first two fingers on my right hand burn after a day of time coding subtitles, my left wrist gives out on me after a couple of hours of fast typing, and the space between my right thumb and forefinger gets sore when I use the mouse to edit. And for a hobby, well, I knit!

Since I want to keep working for many, many years these aches and pains are starting to worry me. I've already tried the fancy ergonomic keyboard. It didn't help. Other translators swear by speech recognition software. I'm kind of a technophobe, so I've put off investigating this possible solution. But I noticed the free Dragon Dictation app in iTunes the other week and decided to give it a spin.

Two observations: 1. The software works surprisingly well. 2. I don't like dictating translations.

Working with Dragon Dictation has made me realize how deeply ingrained my translation habits are. When I look at a chunk of Russian text, I start typing words that I think may be useful in the translation. Not always in order. Then I use shortcut keys to run back and forth between the words, rearranging them and adding new information. To an observer, it probably looks like I'm playing a strange version of the shell game. If I want to use dictation software, I'll have to form complete sentences in my head and then read them aloud. That's doable, but it won't be easy.

I do have one trick up my sleeve, though. When I'm in a big hurry, I do what I call "reading backwards." Longer Russian sentences tend to organize their information "backwards," putting the new or important information at the end. English puts new or important information at the beginning of sentences. So I read each Russian sentence backwards and type it out in English as I read. This works surprisingly well, and it may be a good technique to combine with dictation to save my poor hands some pain.

О шерифах и ментах

2011-02-12T23:56:00.000-08:00

Наконец-то решила заняться шерифом. Почему? Потому, что меня часто спрашивают, чем этот шериф отличается от state trooper или police. Попробую ответить коротко.

Шериф появился раньше всех в истории правоохранительных структур в Америке. Власти в Англии назначали шерифов, чтобы следить за порядком и собирать налоги в колониях. После революции, должность шерифа продолжала существовать без особых изменений. В случае надобности, шериф мог призывать местных жителей на облаву преступника, но шерифские будни протекали иначе - содержанием тюрьмы, организацией выборов и собиранием налогов. Такая общая административная работа.

State troopers и police - структуры более современные. Бостон создал первый городской police department в 1838 г. State troopers (они же и Highway Patrol) появились уже в 20-м веке. Должностные инструкции у них бывают разные, в зависимости от штата, но как правило state troopers занимаются движением на трассах и личной безопасностью губернатора, а police просто ловят преступников в черте своего города.

В больших городах, старый шериф теперь всего лишь доставляет подозреваемых из jail в courthouse и обратно. В глухих местах, шериф и его помощники патрулируют за чертой городков и населенных пунктов.

Если есть еще вопросы, пишите!

The Snake Eaters

2011-01-19T21:11:00.000-08:00

Hedgehogs are blessed with wonderfully descriptive names in every language. The English name brings to mind a little animal snuffling around under bushes. In German, they are called igel, from an Old Teutonic word for "prickly." In Russian, a hedgehog is a ёж (yozh). I couldn't think what the root would be offhand, so I decided to look it up for fun.

According to Vassmer, the name ёж is like the name медведь (med-VED', "bear") because it is a cyper, in this case meaning "snake eater."

If you look at the Vassmer entry on ёж you, too, may notice something I found strange at first. He says that the Russian name for hedgehog also gave us the word for blackberry - ежевика (ye-zhe-VEE-ka), a spiny hedge if I ever met one! Perhaps hedgehogs got their English name not because they waddle around under bushes, but because they are spiny like hedges.

Thinking about spiny hedges reminded me of the Czech hedgehog, an anti-tank obstacle from WWII.

In parting, here is a Russian hedgehog doing what all Russian hedgehogs are supposed to do when no one is looking - carrying mushrooms on his quills:

Black Bread

2010-10-22T14:41:00.000-07:00

Like black bread? Me, too.

Thinly sliced black bread with butter and caviar. Black bread with a piece of sheep's milk cheese and sprigs of green onion. Black bread spread with thick buckwheat honey.

I'm intrigued as to why English recipes for Russian black bread always include things like molasses, cocoa and espresso powder. While black bread goes WITH lots of things, not many things go IN it - the recipe for real Russian black bread is utter simplicity.

My personal favorite is a bread called Darnitsky. Called "gray bread" in Russian, the only ingredients in Darnitsky are whole rye flour, wheat flour, salt, water and yeast. When you cut it open it is gray and soft inside and has small, evenly spaced holes.

My next favorite is Borodinsky. This is a dark rye whose dry ingredients are limited to rye flour, whole wheat flour and rye malt. A small dollop of molasses is added with the salt and yeast, and each loaf is topped with aromatic coriander seeds. Borodinsky is a dense bread that makes excellent garlic croutons.

An important thing to understand about Russian food is that most of it is highly regulated by state standards called GOSTs. All bread labeled Borodinsky must contain 80% whole rye flour, 15% whole wheat flour and 5% malted rye. A Reinheitsgebot for bread, if you will.

You can put cocoa and grated lemon in your rye bread if you want, but the Russian government's official position is that such additives are nonsense. And most of the bread-eating public seems to agree. Expensive hearth-style breads with creative ingredients (and without the GOST stamp of approval) are starting to appear in upscale supermarkets, but the majority raises an eyebrow and buys traditional bread.

Bread lovers in Russia will tell you that where you buy your bread is just as important as the GOST stamp. The best bread comes from bread factory stores.

When I'm in Korolev, I go to Freshest Bread (in the photo), the store operated by the local bread factory, Kaliningradkhleb. According to the factory's official history, it was once part of a chain that belonged to the legendary Moscow baker Ivan Filippov. Nationalized and then privatized (or re-privatized?), the bakery is still there, and its bread is supremely good.

Good Food

2010-10-11T23:59:00.000-07:00

Russian Cuisine in Exile, by Pyotr Vail and Alexandr Genis

I bought this book many years ago in a basement book store somewhere in Moscow, but it wasn't until quite recently that I was able to appreciate it. I think I had to go through years of trial and error in the kitchen followed by mother-in-law boot camp to be worthy of the wisdom Vail and Genis share in Russian Cuisine in Exile, namely: put the garlic in the soup after you've turned off the heat. You'll get more bite that way.

Gender and Language

2010-10-11T22:48:00.000-07:00

Time for another reader question:

"I've always been curious about the cultural and psychological effects of an overtly "gendered" language, i.e., having to conjugate verbs and decline words specific to the speaker's or subject's gender. (In English, I could write a whole blog in the first person and nobody would know I was a woman, for example. In Russian, I'd have to "lie" with my grammar.) What do you make of this?

Good question. It seems very intuitive that gendered languages would reveal something about how people think about the objects or individuals they apply those grammatical genders to. However, gendered languages don't universally apply grammatical gender based on actual or even symbolic gender. Using Russian as an example, is there anything feminine about a digital camera or masculine about a suitcase? (I've always shied away from symbol-hunting, but I won't stop you if that's your thing.)

But could it work the other way around? What if - instead of us imposing our gender concepts on our languages - our languages are sneakily imposing a point of view on us? The official answer is no. Very few linguists today believe that people's feelings about actual gender are affected by their language's use of grammatical gender. English has practically no grammatical use for gender, while Russian, Spanish and lots of other languages do, but you wouldn't say that Russian and Spanish people are more strongly attached to or bound by their living, breathing, human genders than English speakers are, would you? What about the Finn who calls his son "it" and his daughter "it," as well? I know for a fact that lots of little Finnish girls like Disney princesses, so their language has not hobbled or empowered them. Yet.

And here's a few workarounds for writing a blog in Russian without revealing your gender:

1. Use the plural pronoun "we."

2. Use lots of passive constructions - It seemed to me instead of I thought (since the past tense of the verb would reveal your gender in Russian)

3. Switch maddeningly back and forth between genders

Love and the Translator

2010-10-07T15:25:00.000-07:00

I got a question from a reader today asking if I knew anything about the Russian bride phenomenon. She wanted to know if it's true that lots of Russian women go to great trouble and expense to marry American men and if I'd ever encountered these brides in my translation business.

Honestly, it's much easier for me to talk about the second part of the question, so I'll start there.

I occasionally do phone interpreting for an immigration attorney who helps international fiancées prepare for visa interviews at the U.S. embassy. Most of the time I do written translations sitting alone at a computer, so it's always a stretch to do interpreting, which requires faster reactions and listening closely to a conversation over a poor connection. However, these conversations are fairly scripted and I've come to learn what to expect.

Sometimes this attorney refers me to men who would like me to interpret personal calls with their fiancées. This is harder, and I always review my interpreter code of conduct before making each call:

Rule 1. Interpret everything without editing. No matter what (and I do mean no matter what), the interpreter has to relay everything both parties say. These two folks are planning to get married, so communication is vital.

Rule 1a. Keep your kids out of the room while you're interpreting (see above). Learned this one the hard way.

Rule 2. Speak in the first person (don't use "he says/she says" constructions). The idea is to let the parties feel that they are speaking to each other instead of talking to the interpreter.

Rule 3. Introduce yourself to the fiancée before getting started. I like to make it clear that I work with the attorney and am in no way personally acquainted with the man. This is also an opportunity to explain Rules 1 and 2 so that everybody's on the same page.

Of the three, Rule 2 is definitely the hardest for me. I'm naturally a shy person and don't always like to mirror other people's tender emotions.

Now for the first part of the question: do lots of Russian women really put themselves out there on the internet to find American husbands? I suppose they do. Like all of us, I only know the people I know, so my insight is pretty limited. Now that the Russian economy has picked up considerably over the 1990s, my sense is that most "Russian" brides are actually from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

But it's a fact that lots of younger Russian women complain about the male sense of entitlement and wonder if men in other countries might not be more fair and enlightened. Case in point: some women I know were recently cheering on Bozhena Rynska, a TV journalist who was so disgusted when a drunk photographer groped her at a gathering that she tasered him. He responded by punching her in the face. The police get to sort that one out.

Just imagine interpreting for Ms. Rynska as she interviews potential husband candidates - yikes!

Бисквит

2010-06-24T04:12:00.000-07:00

Until recently бисквит (beesk-VEET, sponge cake) was a mystery to me. Store-bought cakes in Russia tend to aim for mile-high showiness and are overly flavored on the inside with liqueurs or syrups, but good homemade бисквит is a treat. If it's done right, you can eat a lot of it without feeling physically or morally compromised.

For some reason my usual approach (pestering people in their kitchens) didn't help me master бисквит. Finally I found a recipe that spells out in detail what the eggs and sugar should look like at each stage and how exactly to fold in the (sifted!) flour. The little individual cakes in the picture will be the foundation for strawberry shortcakes with whipped cream.

Here's another idea: my mother-in-law makes her бисквит in a round pan, slices the finished cake into two layers, puts sliced bananas and custard between the layers, slathers it all with chilled custard, and decorates the top with sliced kiwi and pomegranate seeds. Then she chills the cake before serving. For some reason this dessert reminds me of the banana pudding of my childhood. Or maybe that early banana pudding was reminding me of something wonderful I wouldn't get to try until much later.

The Russian word бисквит is obviously borrowed from French or Italian, and according to my etymological dictionary Bulgarian, Polish and Czech all use a form of the same word. The earliest use of the word in the Russian National Corpus dates to 1783: a Mr. Novikov explaining what desserts are appropriate for little ones in his "On the Rearing and Instruction of Children."

Flying Contraptions

2010-05-19T00:31:00.000-07:00

What do you call airplanes in your language? The Russian for airplane is самолет (sa-ma-LYOT), or "flies on its own." The cool thing is that the word is actually older than the Wright brothers or Alexander Mozhaisky.

Originally самолет could mean anything zipping along under its own power. In fairy tales, the flying carpet was a ковер-самолет (ko-VYOR sa-ma-LYOT). Speedy ferries on Russian rivers were called самолеты. In the early years of aviation, Russians did use the word aeroplane, but eventually the word самолет achieved a monopoly over the flying contraptions, and vice-versa. Interestingly, Russian directly borrows the words "airport" and "aerodrome" instead of creating something out of the word самолет.

Losing My Mind

2010-03-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

I spent a good three minutes looking at a completely new word the other day. It was at the end of a marketing text, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what it meant. Ретвитните (retvitnitye). The root was a mysterious "tvit." The prefix means to do the "tvit" again. The suffix means that it's an imperative.

And then it dawned on me - "tvit" means "tweet!" The text is asking you to retweet an announcement (on Twitter). A Yandex search turned up lots of ретвитните, плз (retvitnite, plz), which means "retweet this, please."

Google Books

2010-03-03T07:23:00.001-08:00

I just discovered a new use for Google Books - when you own a thick reference book with an iffy index, you can search the full text in Google Books and grab the page number!

Retro Monday

2010-03-01T12:28:00.000-08:00

It felt like 1995 at my desk today. First an engineer friend called and asked me to translate a technical term for her. My computer was switched off, so I reached for my two-volume scientific/technical dictionary and found what she needed in a few seconds.

About two hours later I finished what I was working on and headed over to look at the day's translation questions on Proz.com (for some reason I enjoy looking at other people's questions a lot more than I enjoy asking questions of my own - probably because I like digging around). A fellow translator wanted to know what the heck is the difference between the terms attachment, annex, addendum and schedule in a contract. Why waste time Googling when you have the book with the answer literally right at hand? I cracked open Ken Adams' Manual of Style for Contract Drafting and made a colleague's life a little easier. Good times.

And this evening I got an email from a reputable translation agency asking for a copy of my resume.

My resume?!

I was about to check the year on the calendar when my phone went off - project manager texting me about a new job. Whew. It's 2010.

Russian Law Blog

2010-02-25T12:59:00.000-08:00

I came across this blog the other day and bookmarked it. The entry on the emergence of precedence in the Russian legal system was interesting. If you have a strong stomach, scroll down to the Dec. 11 entry on the backlash against Constitutional Court judges who complain about the meddling executive branch...

Winchester

2010-02-17T00:23:00.001-08:00

What's a Winchester?

If you're from Texas, you'll think of a rifle. If you're from Russia, you'll think of a computer hard drive. I live in both places and it never occurred to me to wonder if the two were somehow connected.

The story I recently heard in Russia is that the same Winchester rifle folks also made hard drives back in the day. Stranger things have happened, but this particular business diversification never took place. A wee bit of fact checking revealed that the Winchester hard drive was actually released by IBM in the 70s and got its nickname because it was intended to have two 30 MB spindles, which reminded someone on the project of the Winchester 30-30 rifle.

In Russian, винчестер (vinchester) is a generic term for any hard drive and is often cut back to винт (vint), which happens to be the word for "screw" (as in the screw that propels a submarine).

Компот

2010-02-15T12:17:00.000-08:00

Here's another French word I love in Russian - компот (kom-POTE).

Компот is a fruit drink that Russians put up for the winter in big 3-liter jars like the one you see here on my windowsill. Unlike the French or English compote it takes its name from, Russian kompot does not involve simmering the fruit for a long time. Here's how you do it:

Put your washed berries or sliced fruit in a sterilized 3-liter jar. Fill the jar to the top with boiling water. Let it sit a few minutes. Pour the hot water back into a pot, using a strainer to keep the fruit in the jar. Add a cup of sugar to the water and let it boil thoroughly. Pour the sweetened water back in the jar and close the jar the best way you know how. It takes a month or two for the full flavor of the fruit to leach into the drink, but once it does it's heavenly! Some of my favorites are red current (pictured here), quince and peach. Serve the kompot in a glass pitcher and make sure some of the fruit gets into each glass.

Моветон

2010-01-29T08:26:00.000-08:00

Looking for French words hiding in Russian is like popping sunflower seeds - once you start you can't stop!

Моветон - from the French "mauvais ton," or "bad taste."

I came across an interesting use of the word in the Jan. 25 issue of Dengi. The context is a discussion of the changing role of in-house security employees at Russian companies, specifically the fact that they are less likely to kidnap people now than they once were:

"Подобные ситуации были широко распространены в "лихие девяностые", когда милиция практически не работала по защите "проклятых буржуев". В настоящее время это уже моветон. Но главное не в приличиях, а в неэффективности и рискованности таких действий."

My translation:

"Things like that [kidnappings] were a common occurrence in the wild 90s because the police were basically refusing to protect 'bourgeois pigs.' That would be mauvais ton today. And it's not really a question of manners. It's just ineffective and risky."

I thought it was interesting that the interviewee used the term "mauvais ton" and immediately followed it with the qualification that he isn't talking about manners. He seems to be using моветон to mean "stupid."

When I turned to the Russian National Corpus and searched for моветон, I found this whimsical line from a play by Maxim Gorky:

Не гризе па ле семиачки, се моветон.

Don't munch on les sunflower seeds, c'est mauvais ton.

A Little Grammar

2010-01-27T13:11:00.000-08:00

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.

Colored Pencils

2010-01-25T04:30:00.000-08:00

Want a look at how Russian kids learn Russian?

The colored triangles under the letters indicate whether a letter is a hard consonant (blue), soft consonant (green) or vowel (red).

Reading, Reading and More Reading

2010-01-15T06:17:00.000-08:00

My resolution for 2010 is to read more, and I don't mean reading more work to translate.

First off is Dina Kaminskaya's Записки советского адвоката (Published in the U.S. as Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defense Attorney, You can get it at abebooks for a couple of bucks). I saw a good review several months ago on openspace.ru and immediately bookmarked it. Her description of growing up under Stalin is riveting, and I really enjoy the details on the day-to-day workings of Soviet courts. I've found that I learn history best by reading memoirs, and Kaminskaya's provides the kind of minutiae that I find fascinating.

Next up: a collection of essays and letters written by Ivan Grozny. I lost this book during a move many years ago and have always missed it. Grozny's proposal of marriage to Elizabeth I of England is priceless.

For the spring: Ilf and Petrov's memoir of their U.S. travels. Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. Any suggestions?

Сиринет

2010-01-13T03:20:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I ran into a completely unfamiliar word - сиринет (sirinet). From the context it seemed like a musical instrument of some sort. A Yandex search yielded little aside from a mirror of the text I was already translating (love the Russian internet). Google searches for sirinette, syrinette and cyrinette, with or without the additional term "music," were fruitless as well.

When I inquired, the client replied that a сиринет was a phonograph traditionally used to provide music in a pub-style restaurant.

That solved the immediate problem of how to translate the term: in the very non-technical context the word "phonograph" would do nicely. But I am interested in music history, and a music term that comes up with no relevant hits in Google is enough of a mystery to keep me awake at night.

Sleep works wonders.

The next day it dawned on me that the сирин- part of the word could be a phonetic spelling in Cyrillic of a word that used different vowels in its original language. I might be looking at a word that had a connection to sirens, either the Greek ones or the emergency ones.

Bullseye! The Pulsometer Sirenette was a ship's fog horn. Here are some pictures of Sirenettes (third row down) - they look a little like the amplification horn on a phonograph, don't they?[03.2010 NOTE: the picture gallery is moving hosts - I will revise the link once it is up again]

If anyone knows how pub phonographs came to be called Sirenettes in Russian (and whether or not the name was ever in widespread use) I'd love to hear about it.

Грызть

2010-01-13T00:12:00.000-08:00

Грызть (gryzt) - to chew or gnaw. From here we get the word for rodent, грызун (gryzun).

The other day it occurred to me to wonder whether or not the Russian word had any connection with the English word grist. Remember the old cliché "grist for the mill?" I turned to the OED and found out that grist is the name for grain to be ground at a mill. It can also refer to the act of grinding. The OED also cited an example from the 15th century where grist means to gnash one's teeth in anger.

So the two words don't just sound alike - they're related! Fascinating!

Beowulf and Honey

2009-12-16T13:01:00.000-08:00

Where do I start?

When I was very tiny, back when I still thought that every language had its own alphabet (how could it be otherwise?), my favorite bedtime story was Beowulf. Sometimes my father read it to me in Old English. Sometimes he read it to me in modern English from the Norton anthology. Sometimes he retold it out of his head using small words and directing my attention back to the original words when there was a link. Beowulf was important.

A few years ago I happened to see Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf at Third Place Books and picked it up mainly for the pictures. Once I got into it, I was intrigued by Heaney's description of how he found his register - he brought up in his mind's eye (or ear) the sound of some of his father's relatives and used their voices to achieve what he calls "forthright delivery."

I know that's something I do. I shamelessly use friends and relatives to choose a register for translating dialogue. If I've ever talked to you, consider this fair warning.

In a similar vein, a while back I read an interview with a Russian screenwriter who admitted that he researched the speech patterns for the cops in one of his movies by watching hours and hours of amateur videos posted online by young cops. Hats off to him for that, of course.

But back to Beowulf. The hero's name is a cypher for "bear" (bee+wolf). Interestingly, the Russian word for bear - медведь - is also a cypher: "one who knows where to find honey." Several people have told me that there used to be another word for bear in Russian: бер (ber). For whatever reason, Russians preferred to call the bear by a nickname and the nickname eventually outlived the true name. You can see the older word in the name for a bear's cave: берлога (ber-LO-ga, or "bear-lying place").

Give me some salted cabbage, no sauerkraut!

2009-12-14T08:42:00.000-08:00

I bought the December issue of Хлеб*Соль (Bread*Salt) because it advertised an interview with Valery Syutkin, whose music makes me feel happy and nostalgic. What's that tower of veggies on the cover? It's салат оливье (Olivier salad), the eternal "company's coming" dish made of finely diced potatoes, carrots, pickles, hard-boiled egg, green peas and the meat of your choice, all dressed with mayonnaise and lots of fresh herbs. That may not sound fantastic, but I've had iterations that were very tasty. My friend and mentor Alla Kornibad always added diced green apple. My mother-in-law dresses the salad with sour cream instead of the hated mayonnaise, which she claims is an urban abomination particular to Muscovites. All the wonderful advice I've received about rescuing Olivier from its many pitfalls is for naught - I won't be making it for New Year's or any other holiday.

I do, however, want to make квашенная капуста (salted cabbage). It's nothing like the sauerkraut I remember trying sparingly at church suppers and German-themed festivals in Texas. Russian salted cabbage contains nothing but finely sliced white cabbage, julienned carrots and salt (non-iodized). I've even got a special cabbage knife that produces paper-thin strings of cabbage. You put it all together in a big jar or pot, cover it, and poke holes in it every few days until it tastes done. It isn't really done, however, until you dress a bowl of it with unrefined sunflower oil and add fresh cranberries and chopped green onion. Then you're in heaven (if that's your kind of thing). There's a good article in this issue of Bread*Salt about salted cabbage. From it I learned the word крошиво (kroshivo) - salted cabbage made from the tough outer leaves of the head, plus rye flour.

Lentils - чечевица, сочевица, сочево

2009-12-07T00:58:00.000-08:00

I'm still interested in how the word сочевица morphed into чечевица (lentils). One book I ran across while searching is "Food in Russian History and Culture" - I'll have to pick this one up next time I'm home. I love the cover picture of people carrying boxed cakes. The Google Books preview brought up an interesting passage about disagreement in the Orthodox Church on the proper recipe for kutya.

Gogol-Mogol and the "M" Trick

2009-11-16T23:22:00.000-08:00

Some people like to have a гоголь-моголь (GO-gol MO-gol, a raw egg beaten with sugar) for breakfast, some people don't. I stay away from raw eggs but I'm very interested in the name of the drink. Repeating a word with an "m" instead of the first consonant is a funny little habit that you hear a lot when you talk with people from the Caucasus region. Think шашлык-машлык (barbecue-marbecue) or чай-май (tea-mea). It doesn't seem to mean anything in particular when people do the "m" trick; it just injects a feeling of relaxation into the conversation.

I usually hear Armenians do the чай-май thing on food words, but the other day a Russian relative who grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia was over for tea and he did the "m" trick on a word that had nothing to do with food. He was talking about construction materials and I sat up straight in my seat when he did it. I was too shy to pull out my notebook and write it down at the moment and now, of course, I've forgotten it - a fitting punishment.

Mamalyga

2009-11-07T19:17:00.000-08:00

At lunch today I put cornbread on the table. My father-in-law put on his glasses and exclaimed "It's mamalyga! Where did you find it?"

I told him it was from Trader Joe's.

Mamalyga is polenta. I believe the name mamalyga is used in lots of places from Hungary to Georgia. Here's a very appetizing picture of people eating mamalyga with delicious condiments in Abkhazia. Apparently the name comes from "melega," an old Italian word for corn (or sorghum, depending on where you look).

POSBON, the whole story

2009-11-01T17:55:00.000-08:00

I did find out what the name of the funeral home ПОСБОН stands for: Производственное объединение специализированного бытового обслуживания населения

Here comes the full translation: Production Group for Specialized Life Services for the Public

Life Services?

Быт (life) is a strange word in Russian. It means everyday life, as in slogging through. Small towns still tend to have a Дом Быта, a building full of small businesses that cater to those annoying tasks every human faces: taking your clothes to get dry-cleaned, buying a new extension cord, getting your picture taken for a passport application, buying the specific, hard-to-find brand of cat food your vet recommends, getting the sole glued back on your shoe, etc.

Now that I re-read the above paragraph, I think I prefer the funeral homes that advertise as Ритуальные Услуги (ritual services).

Lahmajoun, and a mystery herb revealed

2009-10-29T18:28:00.000-07:00

First off, the lahmajoun:

I know you can get lahmajoun in Moscow, but I only eat it in L.A. It's a paper-thin Armenian pizza sold in pairs, the sides with the toppings facing each other and a square of paper in between. You roll each one up and eat it with hot tea. Lahmajoun is supposed to be mildly spicy, but this particular lahmajoun stopped at being just savory. Still satisfying.

And now for the mystery herb:

[01/15/10 NOTE: this is actually summer savory, NOT oregano, which is what the saleslady called it!!]

My mother-in-law always chops up a bunch of this very pungent herb and puts it in potato salad or potato piroshki. She calls it citron and I always assumed it was some exotic Armenian herb you could only find at an Armenian grocery in Los Angeles. I've never seen it anywhere else in the U.S. and never at markets in Russia.

I saw some on sale at the store today, and since the place was otherwise empty I asked the saleslady what it was called in English. After a moment she remembered the name - oregano!

I took it home and compared the aroma to a good bottle of dried oregano. The dried oregano smells slightly sweet, like it's already on its way into a bottle of Italian seasoning. Aside from being much stronger, the fresh oregano has a hint of the smell you get when you touch a tomato plant. And it has none of the sweetness of the dried oregano.

My father-in-law remembers picking wild oregano in the hills when he was a boy, and he says the smell was enough to knock you down.

If you can get fresh oregano, try this potato salad:

Start with cooked, chopped potato (starchy, not waxy)

Add chopped bell pepper, halved kalamata or other purple olives, a good handful of chopped fresh oregano, a little bit of finely diced onion

Dress it with olive oil and lemon juice

Память на века

2009-10-28T22:53:00.000-07:00

"Погребение в мавзолее-усыпальнице: скидка - 5% с предъявлением этого купона"

"Mausoleum burial: 5% off with this coupon"

This ad made me put down my fork. I'll let other people wonder about how the deceased are supposed to present coupons, or better yet, pay $26/month for a double. Here's my take on the words:

Мавзолей (mav-zo-LAY) is an obvious borrowing of the word mausoleum. The root of усыпальница (oo-si-PAL-neet-sa) is the Russian word for sleep, and the prefix means "away." It's another word for mausoleum. I'm not sure why the two are used together so often. Perhaps the pair functions as a euphemism. I've always been partial to the word склеп (sklep, or tomb). Makes me think of the mask of Agamemnon. Click the link to see a map of what sklep means in different Slavic languages.

In the same vein, I've wondered for years about ПОСБОН (POSBON), the name of a chain of funeral homes in the area where we live near Moscow. I tried to make it be an abbreviation of funeral home - похоронное бюро - but it just doesn't work. What are the "s" and the "n" doing there? I guess I could call them and ask.

I promise the next entry will be about lovely food and food words.

Лапша

2009-10-23T12:05:00.000-07:00

Now that he's in school, my son's Russian is getting better every day. The other day I heard him say, "Не вешай мне макароны на уши!" ("Don't hang macaroni on my ears!") The actual Russian expression is "лапшу вешать на уши," or hanging noodles (lapsha) on someone's ears, and it means "to tell a lie." I suppose he heard the expression at school and didn't know the word лапша so he substituted Italian macaroni for Russian noodles. Curiously, Russians use the word macaroni for any pasta product, not just elbow macaroni. The word lapsha is reserved for homemade noodles.

According to Vasmer, лапша was borrowed from Tatar laksha, meaning little pieces of dough cooked in a stock.

Зачем вам столько гуталина?

2009-10-02T21:48:00.000-07:00

The гуталин obsession continues. I've found the full names of the "MM. Worms and Zwierchowski" who patented guttaline some time in the 1890s.

Eugene Worms and Alexandre-Sigismond Zwierzchowski worked together on a number of patents, like one here for "an improved bicycle." They also invented things independently and with other partners. I doubt they had much knowledge of Mongol footwear, though.

Sakhalin Island and Buccaneer Physicians

2009-09-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

In re-reading Chekhov's "Sakhalin Island" late last night I ran across the following interesting passage:

"Иду в избу. Там в горнице сидит старик в красной рубахе, тяжело дышит и кашляет. Я даю ему доверов порошок - полегчало, но он в медицину не верит и говорит, что ему стало легче оттого, что он "отсиделся".

Сижу и думаю: остаться ночевать? Но ведь всю ночь будет кашлять этот дед, пожалуй, есть клопы, да и кто поручится, что завтра вода не разольется еще шире? Нет, уж лучше ехать!"

My translation:

"I went into the house. There was an old man in a red shirt sitting in the good room. He was breathing heavily and coughing. I gave him some доверов порошок (doverov poroshok, "dover powder"). It helped, but he didn't believe in medicine so he said that "sitting it out" was what had helped him.

"I sat there and considered whether or not I should spend the night. I knew the old man would be coughing all night, and I suspected there would be bed bugs. And who could say that the water wouldn't spread further tomorrow? No, I decided to keep going!"

As soon as I read доверов порошок I immediately thought that there must be a Mr. Dover somewhere. And there was:

Dover's Powder, a combination of opium and ipecac, was invented by Thomas Dover in 1732. His biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography draws Dover as a colorful figure living in a colorful era. The man got his name in print for reasons ranging from his involvement in "privateering" (read "piracy") and the slave trade to his energetic promotion of his own remedies and his encouragement of patient self-diagnosis. The New York times ran an article about Dover on June 1, 1902 as a retrospective about an obscure figure who invented a remedy that was still very much in use at that time.

Chekhov took his trip to Sakhalin in 1890, and I found incomplete information in a Google Books preview of a 1933 dissertation that Dover's Powder was known in Russia as early as 1812.

The attraction of Dover's Powder at the time of its creation was that the inclusion of a small amount of ipecac (which causes vomiting) would supposedly prevent patients from overdosing.

It would be interesting to know if Chekhov, physician-writer-activist, knew anything about Thomas Dover, physician-pirate-activist.

On Possums

2009-09-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

В детстве мне казалось, что название нашей улицы обусловлено самой природой - в любой день здесь можно встретить по крайней мере три-четыре раздавленных опоссумов. Позже я узнала, что официально улица называется FM 1374 ("farm to market"). Но народное название очень стойкое, чему свидетельствует этот краеведческий знак.

Слово "опоссум" происходит от алгонкин opassom ("белая собака" на языке племени индейцев), позже стали пропускать букву о- в начале слова. To play possum означает притворяться мертвым.

Каково было мое удивление, когда я открыла новый номер "Вог-Вязание" и увидела дорогие нитки из шерсти опоссума.

Indefinite Article

2009-09-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

"A church with a voice like a trumpet"

Английские артикли многим мешают жить. А с дргуой стороны, они тонко передают некоторые нюансы, в том числе и теологические... Прихожане этой церкви не настаивают на своей уникальности. Вполне возможно, что таких божих мегафонов много. Если бы написали "The church with a voice like a trumpet", то это было бы куда более агрессивное заявление.

Мегафон мегафоном, но напротив есть еще одна церковь, которая привлекает посетителей и зарабатывает на текущие расходы продажей барбекью. Там всегда толпа стоит... Пробовали - вкусно (но жирно).

Redneck Putdown

2009-09-20T11:43:00.000-07:00

Back in August I read about a wonderful British expression for taking down an over-confident blow-hard, "all mouth and no trousers." Today I ran into that expression's country cousin, "all hat and no cattle." I saw the phrase in an op-ed piece in the Houston Chronicle, but I can't tell you if it's a genuine Texas saying because I've never heard it before.

There's a roach!

2009-09-14T21:45:00.000-07:00

I've got roaches on my mind today for all the wrong reasons.

Did you know that, in addition to the word таракан (ta-ra-KAN), Russian has another word for roach? It's прусак (pru-SACK). Think back to Chukovsky's Fedorino Gore, where she is making big concessions if only her dishes will agree to come back to her:

Я почищу вас песочком,

Окачу вас кипяточком,

И вы будете опять,

Словно солнышко, сиять,

А поганых тараканов я повыведу,

Прусаков и пауков я повымету

These прусаки are small roaches, and apparently they got their name because Russians thought they came from Prussia. In America, small roaches are called German cockroaches. Supposedly the Germans call them Russian roaches. Lots of finger-pointing going on... I don't care where they're from as long as they stay out of the bathtub. That's all.

Findability

2009-09-13T21:40:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a fascinating book called Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. I picked it up in hopes of gaining some insight on how information turns up when we go digging for it. While there are plenty of Aha! moments in the book (such as a quote from Calvin Mooers, "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome...to have the information than...not to have it.") - I keep noticing that discussions of information retrieval and findability on the internet focus on searchers/users as consumers who want to buy something. As translators, that's not how we use the internet, and I think that how we DO use the internet is worthy of some attention, both as a purely interesting phenomenon in itself and as a way to make our searching more effective.

Vacation Vocabulary

2009-09-07T11:17:00.000-07:00

У нас официальный конец лета - Labor Day (первый понедельник в сентябре). В армии такие дни называют DONSA - day of no scheduled activity. Почты все, кого я видела в ресторанах и кафе на острове Галвестон сегодня, были одеты в стиле island casual или resort casual. Рестораторы в туристических городках используют эти формулировки, сочетающие в себе расслабленность и небольшой шик, чтобы народ не приходил в мокрых купальниках. К сожалению, судя по пустым пляжам, многие в Хьюстоне решили ограничится staycation - то есть, дома сидели.

How to Dig

2009-08-26T21:05:00.001-07:00

I just now got my hands on the July issue of the ATA Chronicle and very much enjoyed Jost Zetzsche's article on ways to get more out of your Google searches by limiting the kinds of results you want to see. Now my head is full of an article I want to write on how translators can more effectively plot our searches before we even get to the stage of deciding whether or not to search site:.gov or site:.org.

A lot of how I approach my searches is based on intuition, but I'm going to pay more attention to my searches and mine the brains of a few friends - if I come up with something good I'll share.

Natural

2009-08-24T14:34:00.001-07:00

A question on ProZ.com today reminded me about all the nuances of the word натуральный (na-tour-ALL-nee, "natural") in Russian. It can mean roughly the same thing as "natural" in English, but it can also mean homemade or homegrown. And it can mean plain, like if you serve baked fish without a sauce or eat yogurt without fruit or honey added.

Hooliganism, Part II

2009-08-23T20:41:00.000-07:00

I think I've mentioned before that I love finding answers. I can't quite put my finger on why the word хулиганство has stuck with me for several months now, but it's had my imagination all fired up. How did the word get borrowed into Russian?

Reading offers some answers: Joan Neuberger's Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 gave me a name - Isaac Shklovskii, a journalist who wrote a column on life in England for the paper Russkoe bogatstvo. He wrote about the word hooligan in a colum in 1898, which happens to be the year the OED records as the first use of the word in print in English.

You can find some of Shklovskii's articles online by searching for his penname (Dioneo), but I couldn't tell from the ones I read what kind of sense of humor the man had. I mean, hooligan would have appealed to his Russian ear in a purely phonetic sense, wouldn't it?

Horses

2009-08-20T17:02:00.000-07:00

I've been digging in horse terms a lot lately. Here are some interesting ones I've found:

Шпрингартен is a jumping chute

Берейтор is spelled "bereiter" in English (-er instead of -or) and means a horse trainer who specializes in training young horses

Левада is a paddock (or corral)

Schlumberger to the Rescue

2009-08-16T01:53:00.000-07:00

I'm not an oil&gas translator, but, like everyone who translates Russian, I run into sticky oilfield terms on occasion and find the illustrated glossary maintained by Schlumberger to be an invaluable resource.

Унитаз

2009-08-11T04:35:00.000-07:00

Our hot water is off for the next two weeks (a scheduled summer occurence, if you can believe it), so the other day I bought a big metal таз (taz, "basin") to fill with hot water for bathing.
My son was very approving - "I like that унитаз (oo-nee-TAZ, "toilet bowl") you bought!"

After I set him straight about the big difference between taz and unitaz, I started digging around to find out where the word came from. My usual first source (who conveniently sits across the table from me at breakfast) suggested that унитаз is short for универсальный таз (all-purpose basin). I knew - no, I had to believe - that he was wrong.

And he was!

I soon uncovered a very entertaining article on the invention of the flush toilet. The article is attributed to Twyford Bathrooms, but it isn't posted on the company's site. Twyford's site does, however, confirm that Thomas Twyford invented the "unitas" in 1883. The prefix uni- was chosen because it was the first one-piece toilet. What about -tas? I guess that was a prudent euphemism. The OED has entries for the word "tass" (meaning a cup or small goblet) dating back to the 15th century.

As the artice concludes, "The Unitas was shipped into Russia and the name UNITAS became the Russian word for WC!"

And how convenient that the trade name dovetailed so nicely with a Russian word that made the shape (if not the purpose) of the new product very clear! That's all I have to say about унитаз.

Таз, by the way, came into Russian and lots of other languages from Persian via Turkish. The OED says that the immediate ancestor of tass in English is, of course, tasse in French, but it also ultimately traces the word back to Arabic and Persian, where it meant cup or goblet.

Решето

2009-08-06T03:28:00.001-07:00

We bought a sunflower head at the market today - now we'll have to dry it and then pull the seeds out and toast them.

While we were picking through the box choosing the head we wanted, a tiny old woman told my son "Смотри, у тебя решето почти полное" ("See, your seed head is almost all full"). I've always known the word решето to mean colander or strainer. Now I'm thinking it can mean anything with a grid- or mesh-like structure. Neat, huh?

Sunflower seeds and oil are such a huge part of Russian cuisine that I was surprised to learn that Helianthus annuus was actually brought to Europe from the Americas.

Architecture Glossary

2009-08-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

Плужников В.И. "Термины Российского Архитектурного Наследия" Москва, "Исскуство" 1995

Pluzhnikov V.I. "Vocabulary of Russia's Architectural Heritage" Moscow, Isskustvo, 1995

I bought this book ages ago - well, ten years ago actually, but it feels like ages. I've only used it a few times to look things up for a translation, but it's fascinating reading and has illustrations for some of the entries. Here's a taste:

ОБЫДЕННАЯ ЦЕРКОВЬ - A church built in one day in gratitude for a military victory or in order to prevent or put an end to some calamity.

ЗАБОРОЛ - A wooden platform above the walls of a fortress from where one could throw logs at the enemy or pour boiling water or hot pitch on him.

ЕЗ (ЭЗ) - Piles or net stretched across the entire bed of a river to stop fish from moving upstream.

At the back of the glossary is a detailed chapter on how to decode the old Russian system of writing dates with letters instead of numbers, which you can sometimes see on very old buildings or works of art.

Лисички

2009-07-29T01:57:00.000-07:00

These are my favorite mushrooms - лисички (lee-SEECH-kee, chanterelles). We have found baskets and baskets of them in the mountains east of Seattle and I always buy them at the market when we're in Russia.

I saute them in butter until all the liquid is gone, and then I add sauteed onion (from a separate pan) and salt to taste. Some people add sour cream, but I don't thinkit's necessary when you have meaty лисички. Serve with steamed or boiled potatoes.

We love mushroom-hunting in the late summer. Funny, but there is a fair amount of disagreement in Russian and U.S. mushroom books on which ones are edible. To be on the safe side, I stick to hunting the supermarket varieties.

Here is a list I put together of the Russian and English names for some common mushrooms and the Latin names linking them.

Russian common name	Scientific name	English common name
Шампиньон	Agaricus silvaticus	Button mushroom
Шампиньон тонкий, Шампиньон желтокожий	Agaricus xanthoderma	Poison yellow meadow mushroom
Лисичка	Cantharellus cibarius	Chanterelle
Лисичка ложная	Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca	False chanterelle
Лисичка серая	Craterellus sinuosus	Chanterelle
Белый гриб	Boletus edulis	Porcini, king bolete
Бледная поганка	Amanita phalloides	Death cap
Мухомор красный	Amanita muscaria	Fly agaric
Мухомор поганковидный	Amanita citrina	False death cap
Подберезовик белый	Leccinum aurantiacum	Brick cap, red cap bolete
Подберезовик обыковенный	Leccinum scabrum	Birch bolete
Масленок поздний	Suillus luteus	Slippery Jack
Масленок зернистый	Suillus granulatus	Weeping Bolete, granulated slippery jack
Моховик пестрый	Xerocomus chrysenteron	Red Cracking Bolete
Моховик зеленый	Xerocomus subtomentosus	Suede Bolete
Навозник серый	Coprinus atramentarius	Tippler’s bane
Навозник белый	Coprinus comatus	Shaggy ink cap
Навозник рассеянный	Coprinus disseminatus	Fairy ink cap
Навозник мерцающий	Coprinus micaceus	Glistening ink cap
Навозник складчатый	Coprinus plicatilis	Pleated ink cap
Вешенка устричная	Pleurotus ostreatus	Oyster mushroom
Вешенка беловатая	Pleurotus pulmonaris	Pale oyster
Сыроежка пищевая	Russula vesca	Bare-toothed russula
Сыроежка зеленая	Russula aerguinea	Tacky green russula
Сыроежка сине-зеленая	Russula cyanoxantha	Charcoal burner
Сыроежка сереющая	Russula decolorans	Graying Russula
Подгруздок белый	Russula delica	Short-stemmed russula
Подгруздок черный	Russula adusta	Wine-cork brittlegill
Опенок осенний	Armillaria mellea	Honey or oak mushroom
Опенок луговой	Marasmius oreades	Fairy-ring mushroom
Опенок зимний	Flammulina velutipes	Velvet foot (Enokitake)
Опенок серно-желтый	Hypholoma fasciculare	Sulfer tuft
Опенок летний	Kuehneromyces mutabilis	Sheathed wood tuft
Опенок Кандоля	Psathyrella candolleana	Pale brittlestem
Опенок темный	Armillaria ostoyae	Honey mushroom
Рядовка	Tricholoma caligatum	Booted tricholoma
Рядовка белая	Tricholoma album	White knight
Рядовка буро-желтая	Tricholoma fulvum	Birch knight
Свинушка тонкая	Paxillus involutus	Brown roll rim, poison pax
Головач продолговатый	Calvatia excipuliformis	Pestle puffball
Дождевик	Calvatia gigantea	Giant puffball
Дождевик шиповатый	Lycoperdon perlatum	Common puffball
Сморчок высокий	Morchella elata	Black morel, fire morel
Сморчок обыкновенный, настоящий	Morchella esculenta	Yellow morel, white morel
Сморчковая шапочка	Verpa bohemica	False early morel, spring verpa
Ежовик желтый	Hydnum repandum	Hedgehog mushroom
Майтаке, грифола курчавая, гриб-баран	Grifola frondosa	Sheep’s Head (Maitake)
Строчок обыкновенный	Gyromitra esculenta	False morel, brain mushroom
Строчок гигантский	Gyromitra gigas	Snowbank false morel
Рогатик гребенчатый, клавулина гребенчатая, коралл гребешковый	Clavulina cristata	Crested coral fungus
Свиное ухо	Gomphus clavatus	Pig’s ear gomphus
Рыжик	Lactarius deliciosus	Delicious milk cap
Трутовик настоящий	Fomes fomentarius	Hardwood conk

Trash Setters

2009-07-28T04:48:00.000-07:00

I've never paid any attention to Ksenia Sobchak. I'm aware she's out there, but that's about it... I ran across her column in the Russian Sex and the City magazine today and I may start following it - she's actually kind of witty and she has such great material to work with.

Here are some fun things I picked out:

Трэш-сеттеры - setting the bar for trashy

Трэш-находка - trashy yet original

Трогательный - touching and sweet, but also twee, pitiful

Скукситься - to sulk, droop

Юбка-брюки (юбка-шорты) - the skort

Икра

2009-07-21T00:40:00.000-07:00

Did you think I was talking about the pricey stuff from Astrakhan?

This is eggplant caviar, or баклажановая икра (ee-KRA). Supposedly Russians call the dish "caviar" because the eggplant seeds look like fish roe. My mother-in-law makes tons of eggplant икра in the summer. On the evening before a cookout we always have the same discussion: will she make the икра at home in the morning, or wait and do it on the campfire? She is generally inclined to do the messy work at home and produce a clean, shiny bowl of roasted veggies when the guests arrive. Us youngsters always want her to roast the vegetables over the campfire. Done that way, the eggplant икра is smoky and smooth without being oily at all. When you make it on the stove, you have to add a lot of oil. It's still very good, but not transporting.

Here's how we make it at home with less oil. A little smoky, not hard:

Put whole eggplants (skins on) in a heavy skillet and roast on high heat, turning only when each side is totally charred and soft.

Peel the eggplants once they are cool enough to handle.

Put the soft eggplant goop back in the skillet. Add chopped tomatoes, bell peppers and onion. We usually use a ratio of 2:2:1:1 (eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, onion). Add a little oil (olive, sunflower, you name it).

Cook on low heat for two or three hours, stirring every now and then, until the икра is a smooth paste.

The tomatoes will give off a lot of liquid at first. You have to let that liquid cook off.

Add salt and sliced garlic to taste. Once the икра is room temperature, add chopped cilantro and refrigerate!

On a linguistic note, the Japanese call salmon roe ikura, but apparently the Russian word икра (meaning any kind of fish roe) comes from good old Indo-European.

More Word Fun

2009-07-19T00:34:00.000-07:00

Очень забавный список надоевших слов и выражений из области дизайна и интерьера.

http://decorno.blogspot.com/2009/07/word-funeral.html

Good People

2009-07-16T08:05:00.000-07:00

Когда я была дома в Техасе этой весной, я услышала замечательное местное выражение - "He's good people."

Объясню:

Мой сын болеет дорожной техникой - пройти мимо просто не в силах. Одно теплое, влажное утро работники подогнали экскаватор прямо к нашему дому, чтобы асфальт раскопать и менять какие-то трубы водоснабжения. Когда сын вышел смотреть (а как же!), водитель пригласил его в кабину и дал ему ковш поднимать-отпускать пару раз. Потом серезная работа началась и сына вежливо прогнали. Мы с бабушкой ему подсказали, чтобы он поблагодарил дядю-экскаваторщика и все этим и кончилось.

Через неделю, мы с сыном рассматривали призовых буренок и лощадей на выставке во время местного родео. Нас узнал один из товарищей зкскаваторщика, подошел и поздоровался с сыном. Когда я опять выразила свою благодарность за то, что бригада сына побаловала, он засмеялся и сказал про экскаваторщика - "Yeah, Jimmy's good people. Real good people."

Чем отличается от знакомой всем фразы "He's a good person"? Могу только сказать, что кандидат в good people должен быть добродушный, простой, без особых замашек, любим и уважаем своими соседями. И объязательно должен был родиться в Техасе!

Hooliganism

2009-07-15T02:04:00.000-07:00

Хулиганство (hoo-lee-GAN-stvo, "hooliganism") is another interesting word in Russian.

"In the Anglo-American world hooliganism is a popular journalistic expression to describe public disorder at sporting events or other public gatherings. It is not a legal term. In Soviet law and now Russian Law the term 'hooliganism' is a particular administrative and criminal offense... The term is believed to have entered the Russian language late in the nineteenth century."
Russian Law, W.E. Butler

"The term 'hooliganism'... had become popular among Russian legal scholars before the revolution as a characterization of lawless, disorderly and purposeless misconduct. It was only introduced into legislation, however, by the 1922 Criminal Code."
Soviet Criminal Law and Procedure, Harold Joseph Berman

The OED gives 1898 as the earliest published use of hooliganism in English, so the word must have been moving fast!

The photo above is of a very vivid wall near our home. It looks even better in the snow. And yes, graffiti is considered хулиганство in Russia.

Кабак

2009-07-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

I like to follow a wonderful blog on Turkish cuisine that features enticing closeups and simple recipes. A recent entry was on stuffed squash - Etli Kabak Dolmasi.

In Russian, squash is кабак or кабачок (ka-ba-CHOK), the Turkish word with a Russian ending. But кабак has another meaning in Russian that has always mystified me. A кабак is a loud tavern-style restaurant. As in the immortal "Если б я был матрос, я б уплыл по тебе, как по морю / В чужеземном порту пропивать башмаки в кабаке" ("If I were a sailor, I would sail away over you like the sea, / to a кабак in a foreign port where I'd sell my shoes for a drink").

I've lived here for years assuming that squash and taverns had somehow cross-pollinated in the Russian mind, but now I see I was wrong. Vasmer mentions theories that the term might come from a similar-sounding Turkish word for a boxing match (where the spectators would drink?), from Arabic, or even from German. A wee bit disappointing...

Bing and Translators

2009-07-08T11:57:00.001-07:00

I'm not looking to trade search engines, but I decided to kick Bing's tires after reading a New York Times review of it by David Pogue. In short, he says Bing is better at providing you with concierge-type information. So if you search for a particular camera model, it gives you a nifty chart of features and prices at different sellers. Movie times, driving directions, etc.

Because I'm not the concierge in my family, that's not how I use the internet most days. The gold mine for me is a digital, searchable, real book or a relevant online trade journal. So I decided to follow the columnist's advice and pop over to http://bing-vs-google.com/ to run my recent search for information on земляника in comparison mode.

Bing handed me an excerpt from the book "The Strawberry: History, Breeding and Physiology" by G.M. Darrow. When I looked up from reading, half an hour had gone by. This was good stuff. Then Google reminded me about Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, and when I looked up from reading that another half an hour was gone (and I've read this one before!).

A tie.

Then I searched for information on Russia+arbitrazh.

Bing came back with a long list of Russian sites that mention the word арбитраж in Russian. I intentionally searched for the transcripted word because I was looking for English-language commentary, but Bing ignored that. I also noticed that most of the sites were law firms offering to represent you in an arbitrazh court. Is that a symptom of the concierge focus Pogue mentioned? Does Bing assume that if you're searching for something it's because you want to buy it (or buy your way out of it)?

Google brought back a number of articles written by US/UK lawyers and NGOs about the state of Russia's arbitrazh courts. That's more the kind of thing I'm usually looking for.

To get a better picture of their differences, I kept the Bing v. Google site open to do all my searching during a normal day of work. Time and again, Bing handed me results that: 1) ignored aspects of my search query (like quotation marks!) or 2) were links to spammy sites where my search term appeared to be a random entry.

For now, I'm sticking with Google.

Земляника

2009-07-08T06:25:00.000-07:00

My sister-in-law is a forestry major here where we live in Russia. When it's the season for земляника (zem-lya-NEE-ka, tiny wild strawberries) she spends several hours a day picking in the woods. Sometimes she takes people with her, but not often. The berries are microscopic and hide under the leaves of larger, taller plants, so you basically have to crawl around on hands and knees until you find a bunch of them in one spot. To get a sense of how small they are, the spoon in the picture is a small teaspoon. Masha mediates while she picks and chain-smokes to keep the mosquitoes away. After about an hour I've had enough. We're lucky she shares with us.

Земляника season is short. I love the anticipation. Friends come back from walks in the woods saying "Almost. The flowers are out." "Just another week. We saw green berries." Now they're here.

Apparently земляника and plain old strawberries are different species of the same genus. I know for a fact that земляника has a much more pronounced aroma and flavor.

One winter several years ago when my son was an infant, I found myself translating letters written by Soviet soldiers during WWII. The work was hard - hard to read and hard to translate. One man called his baby "my little dandelion," and I could see the baby's halo of fuzzy, blond hair.

Another writer said "The земляника is ripe, and I’ve been treated to 'Victoria' in some of the Lithuanian villages. If it weren’t for the war, life would be terrific."

I thought that maybe Victoria was a kind of wine or dessert made from земляника, but some other Russian translators told me it is a cultivar of strawberry. A couple of Russian gardening and botany sites claim that Victoria was the first cultivated strawberry to be introduced in Russia and that it was named after Queen Victoria.

Mors

2009-07-03T10:49:00.001-07:00

We drink a lot of mors around here. We buy it in boxes at the store, but my sources say that true mors is made by adding water to an almost-empty jar of jelly and shaking vigorously.

The good old Domostroy (16th century) contradicts this, giving the following recipe:

"О морсе ягодном. Готовить простой морс ягодный можно из любых ягод. Сложить ягоды с водой в котел так, чтобы проняло их, но к котлу бы не пригорели, да варить в котле ягоды с водою долго, пока не разварятся ягоды, и на ночь их ставить, чтоб отстоялся морс ягодный от гущи начисто, затем слить тот морс ягодный с гущи и разлить его по бочкам, в которых не было дрожжей."

My translation:

"On berry mors. Simple mors may be made from any type of berry. Put the berries in a pot with enough water to keep them from sticking and simmer until the berries fall apart. Leave the pot overnight for the sediment to settle. Filter off the berry mors and pour it into barrels that have never held any yeast."

That recipe would make a mors that is much less sweet than either jelly-jar water or the mors you can buy at the store. Sounds pretty good if you drink it cold.

What about the word itself?

Vasmer says mors probably comes from the Romanian word múrsă, which he says meant "honey water, juice or liquid." My paper etymological dictionary goes further, stating that the Romanian word can be traced to the Latin mulsa, "honey drink." It also offers the German word for cranberry, moosbeere, as a possible source.

I noticed that Domostroy classifies mors along with medovukha and other drinks made from honey.

As a culinary-legal aside, GOST 51398-99 defines mors as a juice drink containing less than 25% juice. I read that in the July 2009 issue of Gastronom, and I have the strangest sense of translator's deja-vu that I have translated that GOST at some point in my life.

EDGAR

2009-07-03T04:41:00.000-07:00

The U.S. SEC online databse of filings, EDGAR, is a treasure trove for translators. I picked up this tip from Ken Adams (not a relative) and use it all the time. Searching EDGAR is different from using Google to comb the SEC site because it lets you search for terms and phrases in actual forms filed by companies, not just in SEC publications and instructions.

Keep in mind that EDGAR is a conceptual search engine. That means that when you type in a key word, it will show you results that, while related, do not necessarily contain the actual search term. So EDGAR is a good place to do some real reading, but you can't do a quick "Google poll" to choose between two possible translations for a term.

If you want to search all historical filings, EDGAR limits you to searching for key words in the filings' header information. If you choose to do a full text search, you are limited to the last four years.

Have fun!

Word Fun

2009-07-03T01:28:00.000-07:00

Если время есть, рекомендую заглянуть на сайт Urban Dictionary. Там очень много полезного материала, и каждая статья в словаре получает рейтинг +/- от пользователей, что позволяет оценить популярность той или иной фразы. Поиск работает довольно примитивно (если задать слово texting, то получаешь только статьи, где слово texting фигурирует в заголовке статьи), но можно нажать Browse и перелистать сразу много статей.

Гуталин

2009-06-26T07:19:00.000-07:00

Let's say you just watched Простоквашино (the one where Dyadya Fyodor ditches his parents at the train station) for the umpteenth time and are wondering where the word гуталин (goo-ta-LEEN, "shoe polish") came from.

Sounds German, right?

So you pop over to the Russian Wikipedia to get the lay of the land. You find out that:
A) гуталин was invented in France during the reign of Charles II (no reference)
B) гуталин was made of eggs mixed with ashes and either vinegar or beer (again no reference)
C) the word гуталин comes from the Mongol word for shoes - "gutal" (who needs references, anyway??)

Never, never put your faith in the Russian Wikipedia. The English WP has a whole lot more people inputting on the articles, and even so you can run into impressionistic articles. But the Russian Wikipedia is like a phone book put together by a deaf insane asylum patient ("Snip, snip, what fun! Cutting and pasting little bits of information from around the web into this nice template! The Mongol word for shoes! Delightful!")

Shutting the door on all the noisy RWP fun, you think of all the possible spellings for goutaline/gouthalene/guttaline and search Google books.

Guttaline returns a snippet of an article in an 1892 edition of "Electrical Engineer," where the following intriguing definition is given:

"Guttaline - A new preparation for the purpose of replacing indiarubber and guttapercha, has been brought out and protected by MM. Worms and Zwierchowski. To a quantity of Manila gum tempered with benezene is added 5 per cent. of Auvergne bitumen, also mixed with benzene..."

That reference to gutta percha caught my eye as being possibly relevant. These two guys invented a replacement for a natural material and patented it with a name that reminded people of that natural material.

Not as interesting as a medieval Mongol-French cultural exchange on the subject of shoe polish, but somehow more convincing. I am still very interested in this word and will keep digging...

Чечевица

2009-06-25T11:43:00.001-07:00

This morning I found myself pondering lentils as I made soup. I always assumed that чечевица (che-che-VEET-sa, "lentils") was a borrowed word because it didn't sound particularly Russian. When my paper etymologycal dictionary failed to turn up anything (oh yes, it has Чебоксары, but no чечевица), I went online and discovered Max Vasmer.

According to Vasmer and a couple of other dictionaries I cross-referenced, чечевица used to be called сочевица (so-che-VEET-sa) in the olden days after a vegan dish that people made to eat on fasting days. I've only had the gruel made of wheat, but apparently lentils were incorporated as well. That's a recipe I'll have to try...

Think you know the Russian alphabet?

2009-06-24T02:59:00.001-07:00

А Б В Г Д Е Ё... right?

Not always. I'm translating a series of documents that have long lists of items starting at A, Б, В...

But when they get to E, the lists skip right to item Ж without including Ё. They also exclude Й.

Summer Reading and Murder

2009-06-23T02:30:00.000-07:00

I move a lot, and that means that my huge collection of books is stored in a number of places on two continents. Where is Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf? Good question.

But the flip side of that coin is that sometimes I find things I wasn't even looking for.

For example:

This is the kind of book you can pick up and start reading in the middle, which is what I did as soon as I found it in a box of miscellaneous household goods. On p. 125, Crystal explains that in Anglo-Saxon society, the word murder meant any killing that was "particularly wicked or hateful." It also had to be done in secret to count as murder.

Now if only I could find Beowulf...

Kolomna and gramophones

2009-06-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

I've been to Kolomna a few times to see the beautiful Kremlin and churches (click here to see some good pictures).

One of my new clients is a newspaper in Kolomna, and I learned from one of its articles that apparently the city was once home to a large phonograph (or gramophone) manufacturer. A group of volunteers is putting together a gramophone museum. When I go back for another visit that will definitely be on my list of places to see.

The Russian word for gramophone is patefon. It seemed like an obvious borrowing from French, but a Google search for the word only turned up Russian hits. Hmm... Then I stumbled across a Wikipedia article about the brothers Charles and Émile Pathé. They originally leased an Edison phonograph for a cafe they owned, but after a while they decided to make their own devices and sell them under the Pathé brand. The pathephone! Interestingly, the photo in the Wikipedia article shows a record labled "Pathé Frères Phonograph Co." So the Pathés used the word phonograph.

In Radio Drama, Tim Crook describes Soviet director Dziga Vertov complaining that post-production is a pain with pathephones. I just bet it was.

Сакура

2009-06-17T22:34:00.000-07:00

Знакомая американка, которая свободно владеет японским (и еще много чего умеет) разъяснила:

перый иэроглиф - сакура, "вишневое дерево"
второй иэроглиф - хана, "цветок"
третьий иэроглиф - ран, "хаос, много"
четвертый иэроглиф - ман, "наполненный"

Если их читать вместе, то получается либо "переполненный цветками сакуры" или "сакура бурно цветет".

A friend of mine who speaks Japanese fluently (and has a lot of other talents, too) explains:

the first character is sakura, or cherry tree.
the second character is hana, or flower.
the third character is ran, or chaos/disorder.
the fourth character is man, or full.

If you read them together, you get "full of sakura flowers" or "the sakura are blossoming like crazy."

I thought it said something like bon appetit!

Якитория

2009-06-17T10:59:00.000-07:00

Заметили эти иэроглифы в Якитории сегодя вечером. Естественно, хочется узнать, что тут написано. Узнаю и доложу.

Кстати о названии "якитория" - соседка-японка в Сиэттле объяснила мне, что это слово означает "шашличная", и очень удивилась, что в московских якоториях дают и суши, и сашими, и всякие там супы...

We noticed these characters (is this Kanji?) in the Japanese restaurant Yakitoria around the corner from our apartment. I want to find out what they mean, and I'll post here when I do.

Interestingly, my Japanese neighbor in Seattle told me that Yakitoria means "barbecue restaurant." She was surprised to hear that the Moscow Yakitorias serve sushi, sashimi, soups, etc.

Тунеядец

2009-06-16T03:20:00.000-07:00

Тунеядец (pronounced too-nee-YA-dets, meaning "bum," "sponger") - that sounds good in the current recession, doesn't it? It's so obviously intentional. The тунеядец hasn't lost his job. He never bothered to get one. I remember a Los Angeles Times journalist once describing the kind of people you see out and about in the middle of a sunny day "looking like work was never invented." That's the тунеядец. Although freelancers sometimes get mistaken for тунеядцы, we won't worry about that.

The word has a great sound. It doesn't really roll off your tongue - it kind of pops out of your mouth and offends someone before you can stop it. But where does it come from? What are its roots?

A friend and I were discussing this very point at the Molodaya Gvardiya bookstore, so I nabbed a two-volume etymological dictionary (Историко-этимологический словарь современного русского языка, Черных, П.Я., Медиа, 2007) and we headed to the checkout. Once I got the plastic wrap off the set I discovered that there was no entry for тунеядец. Oh, it had туннель (tunnel) and турист (tourist) - WTF? - but no тунеядец.

Later that evening I was having tea with another linguist friend who quickly thought through the question and laid it out for me.

The first part of the word, туне-, comes from втуне, which means "in vain," "to no good purpose." The second part, -ядец, means "one who eats."

So a тунеядец is a person who eats to no good purpose. Hangs out in the kitchen but doesn't buy groceries.

I have so many questions milling around without answers that I get really excited when I do find an answer.

The dictionary? Relegated to bathroom reading.

Psst...what did they say his name was again?

2009-06-14T23:52:00.000-07:00

In the Spring issue of Slavfile Liv Bliss recommends Jim Shipp's Russian English Dictionary of Surnames for tracking down names that have been transliterated into Cyrillic. That's a book I'd like to see.

Ever heard of the famous French diver Kusto? Or Franklin Roosevelt's envoy to Moscow Josef Davis?

Okay, my first example is really easy, and the second one is really easy to find out.

But what about the Лорд Ридлинг (Lord Riedling? Lord Readling?) I encountered a while back? No name and no personal context, other than the fact that he was a well-known English Jew.

The general context is May 1939, and some of the mysterious lord's contemporaries are one Лорд Винтертон ("Lord Vinterton") and a German referred to as нацистский представитель Волтхат ("the Nazi representative Voltkhat").

Cyrillic masks removed, the men were: Lord Winterton (easy), Helmuth Wohlthat and...

Sir Rufus Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading!

I wasted a lot of time beating my head on the Internets searching for various English spellings of Ридлинг before it dawned on me that it wasn't a very English-sounding title and might be misspelled. In another 5 minutes I found the man.

Language Digger

Flying Carpet

Tired Hands, Reading Backwards

О шерифах и ментах

The Snake Eaters

More Reading

Black Bread

Good Food

Gender and Language

Love and the Translator

Бисквит

Flying Contraptions

Losing My Mind

Google Books

Retro Monday

Russian Law Blog

Winchester

Компот

Моветон

A Little Grammar

Colored Pencils

Reading, Reading and More Reading

Сиринет

Грызть

Beowulf and Honey

Give me some salted cabbage, no sauerkraut!

Lentils - чечевица, сочевица, сочево

Gogol-Mogol and the "M" Trick

Mamalyga

POSBON, the whole story

Lahmajoun, and a mystery herb revealed

Память на века

Лапша

Зачем вам столько гуталина?

Sakhalin Island and Buccaneer Physicians

On Possums

Indefinite Article

Redneck Putdown

There's a roach!

Findability

Vacation Vocabulary

How to Dig

Natural

Hooliganism, Part II

Horses

Schlumberger to the Rescue

Унитаз

Решето

Architecture Glossary

Лисички

Scientific name

Graying Russula

Velvet foot (Enokitake)

Giant puffball

Hardwood conk

Trash Setters

Икра

More Word Fun

Good People

Hooliganism

Кабак

Bing and Translators

Земляника

Mors

EDGAR

Word Fun

Гуталин

Чечевица

Think you know the Russian alphabet?

Summer Reading and Murder

Kolomna and gramophones

Сакура

Якитория

Тунеядец

Psst...what did they say his name was again?