Google Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.