Hi there, welcome to my blog and,please, feel free to check with my ideas about translation and especially Russian translation. Smart Translation offers to look at translating from different perspectives with balanced and wholesome approach to every text. Dealing with Smart Translation in my face you initiate a long term cooperation with an aspired, well-traveled, well-read and culture-aware translator.

Why choosing Smart Translation?

To reach a new step in your business, to go global you would need to expose your product to the bigger audiences, like Russia, where Russian language is the best communication tool. We can assist you, translating booklets, your website articles, correspondence, surveys, tutorials, anything about your product with a specific Russian touch.

What can we offer?

English<>Russian, Dutch>Russian, German>Russian translations:

Russian translation of any information concerning your business: documents, brochures, tutorials, reports, surveys.

Russian translation of any publication as well as web articles.

Russian translation of commercials to reach a specific Russian audience.

Russian translation of a book as well as an e-book.

Proofreading, editing and sign-off.

What are the areas of expertise?

Business

Computer

Education

Engineering

Fashion|style|beauty

Finances

Hotels | restaurants

Medical general

Travel

Wines

How can you benefit?

Our HQs are in the most southern country in the world. Time difference is 12 hours ahead. We work when you sleep. You do know everything about saying: we need to have it finished yesterday.

Our motto is:

We value your trust,

time,

expectations,

respect.

What else can we do for you?

If you are keen to start communicating in Russian, we can work out your personal course of learning Russian language considering your area of expertise or of interest.

We consult on cultural issues, including etiquette, clothing, styling and food.

About me and my services

I moved to New Zealand and enjoy my life here. From Europe I brought not only my languages like Dutch and German but my highly praised attitude to any job entrusted to me.

What do my services cost?

0,04 USD per word

35 USD per document (1page)

35 USD per hour

350 USD an individual Russian language course (10 lessons)

We will meet your requirements!

Приветствуем всех заходящих “в гости”! “Умелый перевод” предоставляет услуги перевода и редактирования на русский язык с английского, голландского и немецкого. Наш подход к переводу многосторонен, так же как и сама жизнь. Каждый текст рассматривается как целое, где передаваемая информация определяет стиль, лексику и грамматическую конструкцию. Многолетний опыт нашего переводчика позволяет находить простые и оптимальные решения. Качество ни в коем случае страдать не должно. Тематика самая разнообразная: финансы, общая медицина, образование, культура, стиль, отдых, развлечения, торговля, питание, виноделие, путешествия, страноведение. Формат перевода определяете вы. Цена наших услуг: 0,04 цента за слово; при большом объёме цена договорная. Благодарим за внимание!

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As soon as you start translating on a regular basis it is not a bad idea to start collecting interesting idioms in case that you do not use translation memory. “Idiom” comes from the Greek word idios, meaning “one’s own.” An idiomatic expression is one that “we understand among ourselves”.

The idios root shows up in idiosyncrasy, and, of course, idiot: one who keeps to himself, not quite ready for prime time or the public square.

Let’s take a few examples. If you translate from English into Russian “out of sight, out of mind” you will probably end up by “с глаз долой, из сердца вон”. If you try a computerised translation it could be something like “invisible idiot”. No comment is necessary.

Russians often say “как по маслу”, which means something like “easy going” or “going smoothly”, “without any problem”. If a business runs как по маслу, there is no need to worry!

Sometimes the language itself and its flow are important. You lose it and your translation work would be compared to inhaling a scent of a tea rose through a gas mask.

Sometimes the meaning and importance of words can be changed in translation; when a language itself is insignificant because a writer wants people to be attracted to the content of his or her work.

In this case a translator is a co-writer and is free to use his or her language means in order to convey the content in the best possible way. I had a smashing experience of being a part of a translating team working on a translation of a philosophical novel. Quite a reserved 3^rd person narration is fully focused on philosophical issues you should be fluent in and be able to render them in the target language using the right means. It is very easy to start just translating facts, events and consequences but it is not good enough… There are plenty of tiny details which help you to make it work, to make it look and sound as genuine as a source.

There appear to be some things that are untranslatable, and when converted to another language they seem kind of weird sounding, and because of that, they attract attention.

But let’s come back to idioms. Sometimes one little phrase gives translators trouble.

In Russian, English and probably every other existing language, physical gestures and facial expressions – sometimes metaphorical, sometimes actual – are used to convey emotional states. When English speakers use the similar expressions to convey the same emotions, translation is easy. Он почесал затылок (He scratched his head; he was puzzled). Он навострил уши (he paid close attention to what was being said).

Americans puff out their cheeks and expel air as a sign of exasperation, denoted by the words “whew” or “phew.” They also pout. In Russian, this is надувать губы (literally, to puff out one’s lips).

Надувать щёки is a pose of proud self-importance. In English, we’d probably say: to be high and mighty. If we were to convey this by a physical gesture, we might say: to puff out our chests. Or:  be puffed up. Or maybe even: swagger.

It’s a mysterious craft… It emerges from so many things…

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Russian translators are perfectly familiar with the controversies of Russian spelling rules. Nowadays the phonetic and grammatical principles are applied to define a complicated set of spelling rules. Some are related to the ‘relationship’ of series of vowels to hard/soft pairs of consonants. Voiced consonants are devoiced word-finally unless the next word begins with a voiced obstruent. Russian features a general assimilation of voicing and palatalization. The process of voicing assimilation applies across word boundaries when there is no pause between words. To be aware of those rules is crucial for a translator to avoid confusion and embarrassing mistakes.
Well, I have no intention today to explain all those rules as for a Russian translator they are pretty evident, and besides we remember the language and not the rules. We just use it, that’s all. But in my experience I still have some accidents in using commas or not; which punctuation mark belongs here or there.

Granted, in some “mechanical” cases commas are used in English where they aren’t in Russian, including: certain date renditions (“My daughter was born June 17, 1993.”); within large numbers (1,700,000); to introduce direct quotation (“He shouted, ‘Boo!’”); and in friendly letter salutations (“Dear friends,”).

In English, dependent clauses starting with “that,” “what,” “if,” “where,” “when” and the like DON’T want commas before them. And “because” doesn’t needs a comma before it but “потому что” often does.

A subject clause, even a lengthy one, ordinarily doesn’t take a comma after it – although its translation into Russian probably will.

The “which” which starts a restrictive subordinate clause doesn’t need a comma. The point: a который clause in English should not produce a comma reaction.

So for me it means that every time I want to put a comma automatically I don’t do that. How cool is that? Although it works in English and in Russian I just have to follow my intuition.

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Translating industry is found healthy. It means that demand for translators and interpreters is expected to grow by 15% in the coming year as globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide green movement spur demand for information in myriad languages.

E-mail, Skype and other technologies have opened the door to cross-cultural communications, but they alone cannot bridge the language gap.

I perfectly realize that there are a lot of us translators there. But there are quite a few real professionals. It’s not enough to simply speak another language. There is a wealth of knowledge and background you need in your area of specialty.

Translation is far more than words and also far more than the context of words and phrases. Very many different issues are involved. And the spelling has to be impeccable.

Some businesses try to save on translation fees by using free computer programs, but those don’t offer the quality needed to avoid stilted and often nonsensical results.
Slavic grammar is complex, and developed differently than in other Indo-European languages, which means that sentences have to be construed in a very different manner.

The Russian language is full of words of intimacy or endearment. First, the Russian national character is expressive and emotional, and one aspect of it is that it has so many diminutive adjectives and nouns; second, the language itself offers a variety of ways to be expressive and emotional. One of them is suffixes. Russian is sometimes called the language of suffixes.

Russian suffixes express an extremely wide range of emotions and attitudes. They can produce words that are caressing, diminutive, familiar, vulgar or contemptuous.

Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka studied the way Russian suffixes work with Russian personal names. She says the meanings expressed by names with suffixes are so rich and complex they cannot be represented by simple labels such as “affectionate” or “scornful”. Some are ambivalent.

The suffix -ka (as in Lenka) may express familiarity or “anti-respect” but it becomes diminutive and even caressing in Lenochka.

The suffix –ik/ok is used with diminutive connotation when used with masculine names, e.g. Vladik or Sashok.  People use it when they talk to small boys and till they approach adolescence.

In English, suffixes are rarer, and they are less expressive. Most commonly, standard short forms such as Tom or Bill are used with regard to people one knows well. Sometimes, such short forms are preferred by the person and are used officially like Jimmy or Billy.

Translators of fiction face enormous problems rendering the expressive range conveyed by Russian suffixes. The mysterious craft of translation: it has to emerge from the whole — one must see it as a whole, and love it as a whole.

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I would say a good translation is just like a good book; the process and means are not important. What is important is a result.

In the burgeoning world of translators and interpreters it’s all about the niche.

“It’s not just having the language skill. It’s also having the expertise in the subject matter,” said Dahlberg, whose story was striking enough that Nicholas Hartmann, president of the American Translators Assn., retold it during the group’s 50th convention in New York last month.

I am pretty sure that I would leave the convention completely a different person and a better translator, if I was one of the lucky attendees. For four days, some 2,300 attendees networked, traded stories and listened in on workshops and seminars at a Times Square hotel.

That’s 1,000 more than attended last year’s conference — evidence that even in this economy, the industry is healthy.

Hartmann said demand for translators and interpreters is expected to grow by 15% in the coming year as globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide green movement spur demand for information in myriad languages.

E-mail, Skype and other technologies have opened the door to cross-cultural communications, but they alone cannot bridge the language gap.

It’s not enough to simply speak another language. There is a wealth of knowledge and background you need in your area of specialty.

“Translation is far more than words,” said Hartmann, who specializes in translating German patents. It requires him to understand not only the context of words and phrases, but also the technical and legal issues involved. And his spelling has to be impeccable.

The slightest error can cause extraordinary embarrassment.

If somebody is going to make a joke he better makes sure it translates well.
If a leader makes a joke that doesn’t elicit laughs, a good interpreter will say in the listening audience’s language, “It’s a joke that does not translate — please laugh.”

You wouldn’t translate something like “God bless you all” to the atheist audience to avoid embarrassment.

Despite the fact that niche translators and interpreters are “everybody’s lifeline,” they remain in short supply, particularly in U.S. government agencies.

The FBI said its translation workload had doubled since the Sept. 11 attacks. Hospitals, courts, schools and other institutions are struggling to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse population.

But few people have the training it takes to do what can be an excruciatingly difficult job. I am not talking about weekends, but sometimes we have to translate or edit a large document in no time which means working many hours straight.

Some businesses try to save on translation fees by using free computer programs, but those don’t offer the quality needed to avoid stilted and often nonsensical results.
The mysterious craft of translation: it has to emerge from the whole — one must see it as a whole, and love it as a whole.

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The Russian language as the most geographically spread language in the world is spoken both in Europe and Asia by more than 170 million people living in countries like Russia, Moldavia, Belarus, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kirgizstan and Uzbekistan etc. So finding a Russian Translator often becomes an imperative for many businesses, which are keen to trade in that region.

Basically, the Russian is one of the three surviving East Slavic languages from the Indo-European language group; Ukrainian and Belarusian being the two others. The language has a long history, its earliest traces are found in Novgorod in 11th century.

Though the language seems to have a heritage of almost 10 centuries, the written Russian started to gain significance only in 17th century during the reign of the Peter the Great.  It is during his reign that a new alphabet was introduced and the new language started to develop.

Later, famous 19th century writer Aleksander Pushkin developed this language further. In recent times, the language has become almost identical with the spoken Russian. In fact, during that time, the Russian language and literature flourished magnificently in the hands of world class writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevskiy and Gogol. The Russian language was the only official language during both Russian Empire as well as the USSR.

However, these days when the world has become a global village, the culture and language of Russia can no longer remain restricted in that country alone. This is why the Russian translators are eagerly looked for. “It’s not just having the language skill. It’s also having the expertise in the subject matter,” said Dahlberg, whose story was striking enough that Nicholas Hartmann, president of the American Translators Assn., retold it during the group’s 50th convention in New York last month. There is a wealth of knowledge and background you need in your area of specialty. “It’s so easy to communicate, but once you find someone you want to communicate with, you find they don’t speak your language,” Hartmann said. And it’s not enough to simply speak another language. “Translation is far more than words,” said Hartmann. It requires understanding of not only the context of words and phrases, but also the technical and legal issues involved. And the spelling has to be impeccable.

It is not an easy business to find a good Russian translator who can meet all the above mentioned demands. References and certificates can help you to find one, but experience is crucial.

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I watch the developments of the situation on the translation scene. From one side, there is a growing demand in professional translators, especially Russian translators; from the other side, the rates are growing down. The reason partially is in possibility to grab a student from the street to cut expenses. I wonder where the boundaries are? And what happens to a professional translation?

In Scotland recently translation companies have undercut market rates to win the contracts to supply interpreters to Scottish courts and other government services. A court interpreter said the new conditions meant interpreters were effectively being forced to work for less than the minimum wage. It takes many years of practice and training to get to a level that is sufficiantly competent to carry out intricate work in a high pressured environment like court. A lot of interpreters and translators are forced out of the profession because of the low rates of pay.

For better value for money and greater efficiency a professional translator should be engaged.

I, as a professional English Russian translator, am supposed to provide a high quality translation, carry out all the stages of translation myself and as a result to receive less than a minimum payment. I think, OK, at least I have an experience and I am in demand. But I would rather take part in projects for non-profit organisations for free. At least I have a feeling of fulfillment and commitment. And I do what I personally love – translating from English to Russion and from Russian to English.

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There are few interesting tendencies to observe in today’s post.

Everybody is following the collisions in the web. Two media: internet and publishing business are watching each other and waiting for any blunder from each other’s side to grasp the situation and act immediately. If there is an article missing in a magazine; there is an immediate campaign on internet to publish the notorious article in translation, so that the readers can still read it.

So you can see the words ‘Russian translation’ everywhere nowadays. Russia achieved the pick of its popularity; I mean there is a lot of interest in what happens in Russia. It arouses many questions. So I guess, that Russian translators, like myself, are facing a new era.

And another tendency.

As the world gets smaller, readers are turning toward foreign fiction to understand other viewpoints. Far from being just the province of small independent publishing houses, literature in translation has become a mainstream phenomenon, with books that inspire huge bidding wars and literary debates.

There are very talented works of today’s young Russian writers, who speak modern Russian life to the world. And their stories are not lost in translation. Smart translation.

It is nice to believe, that people’s interest in Russian modern literature is growing. So the question is: can a philosophical novel, exploring the question of whether good can exist without evil, like “The Master and Margarita” be translated in such a way that it reads smoothly and fluidly like a bestseller?

Can we talk about a new translation, when, each phrase used in it appeared easily accessible and had a good rhythm. The characters are readily distinguishable from one another.

And the last but not the least. The top 10 countries ranked by Common Sense Advisory’s report “Countries That Matter Most Online in 2009″: U.S., Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, China and Australia. The top 10 languages that provide the biggest bang for a business’ buck are: English, Japanese, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Russian and Swedish.

Even in far New Zealand there is a growing interest in the Russian phenomenon. I happened to be one of the first readers of the science fiction novel where the author tries to penetrate the Russian psyche in order to understand the modern history of the western mankind. The translation of this talented book would become a highlight of my carrier as a translator.

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As a translator I can be proud of being a part of the process of the expansion of our human knowledge and the exchange between different cultures around the world.

The Internet continues to make the distance between people in different countries shorter and shorter. People, regardless of where they come from, are constantly interacting with one another. As we all know, not everyone speaks the same language. The English language is spoken by less than a third of Internet total users, in other words, out of 1.596 million Internet users; only 463 million use this language online, (followed by 321 million that use Chinese online). Less than 10% of the world’s most populated regions speak English: Asia, Africa and Latin America.

As a translator I am a witness of  the beginning of a new era that encourages expansion and contact between people of different cultures and languages. To this moment cultures were isolated by geographical, ideological and linguistic distances.

According to the theory of the six degrees of separation, only six chains separate any of us from another person in the world.

Online people are joined by their common preferences, interests and objectives.This opens the way for people to know each other because they share preferences in spite of having no prior relations in the past.They can exchange information, that depending on their personal interests, may be about scientific investigation, humanitarian or human rights, friendship, studies, etc. My task as a translator is to make the exchange possible.

This opens the way to an unexplored multiplication of the human knowledge, since the information in general, shall be nurtured by different cultural views and ideologies.

An important point to bare in mind, is that the exchange in between cultures, languages and ideologies is created in the users own language. This aspect is of fundamental importance, since contrary to the usual concept of globalization, which implicates the loss of identity, the online exchange is based on a totally new perspective, where users can still express themselves in their own language.

As a translator I belong to those who believe in the importance of cultural exchange and that a better world is possible thanks to worldwide cooperation, tolerance and respect of differences.

My point here is as far as there are human translators any obstacle in communication between people of different cultures and backgrounds can be solved in the name of better understanding and cooperation. Today I translate love letters of those two who want to be happy together and tomorrow I start a big project: translating documents which will allow two companies work together in the same direction. For me both things are of the same value.

Living in the 21st century means to follow the tendencies of the time. As a translator I realize that I have to apply new attributes of translation to make it more accessible.

They say that readers today have developed a text message way of seeing, meaning that their eyes grasp one entire section of text as an image and then go on to the next. For this reason, the sections cannot be too long: ideally, no longer than would fit on the screen of a cell phone or in a single manga picture.

The secret of this new translation may be that an unusually large number of paragraph breaks added to the novel. Text message readers can read the novel by passing from paragraph to paragraph as if from one manga image to the next. They are no less intelligent than their grandparents, but they have a different organ of vision, or a different cable connecting their retinas to their brains.

Each phrase used in the book has to be easily accessible and have a good rhythm. The odors and dust of a foreign society are suppressed.

I can imagine a modern translation of Brothers Karamasov where images alternate artfully with the dialogue.

Perhaps this is part of a global process in which visual thinking is taking on a more central role. And as a translator I accept the new rules.

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How important the right translation is, actually? The truth is that the whole issue was born out of a translation gaffe lately in Africa. Hillary Clinton took affront to the question: “What does Mr Clinton think, through the mouth of Mrs Clinton?” But what the French-speaking student actually asked was misinterpreted by the translator. It’s not the first time Clinton has found herself lost in translation since taking the reins as President Obama’s secretary of state. When she met the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov in March, she came with a present, like all good guests. It was a red and yellow emergency button that had the words “reset” and “peregruzka” written on it – a reference to renewing the US-Russian relationship.

“You got it wrong,” retorted Lavrov, who informed her that “peregruzka” meant overcharge, not reset.  Presumably there was an empty desk at the US State Department the next day.

In his 1963 speech in Germany, the American President John F Kennedy told the world: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Debate exists to this day about the accuracy of the statement, but some language pedants still chuckle to themselves about the fact that Kennedy announced himself as a jelly doughnut and not as a citizen of Berlin (a “Berliner” being both a resident of the city and a doughnut).

President Carter also fluffed a remark in 1977 when, on a visit to Poland, he told the gathered crowd that he wanted to understand their “desires for the future”. The following day, there was good-humoured ridicule in the Polish press when it transpired that his translator had mistaken “desires” for “lusts”.

Earlier this year, America found itself the wrong-footed one when Mirek Topolánek, the former prime minister of Czechoslovakia, accused the US of funding economic stimulus packages by selling bombs. Turns out that Topolánek’s translator had mistranslated “bombs” and “bonds”.

Other countries have had their fair share of translation malfunctions, too. In 2003 Jacques Chirac, then president of France, landed himself in diplomatic hot water after telling several Eastern European countries to “shut up” about the impending Iraq war. (“These countries missed a good opportunity to shut up,” he was reported as saying.)

The French verb “se taire” had been interpreted as to “shut up” instead of the more tactful to “remain silent”.

But then think of the riches that translators have given to the world over the centuries. Myriad ancient texts and advances in science and arts would have been denied without their help. And reflect on the fact that the world may have between 5,000 and 10,000 languages (Wikipedia announces this rather vague number, so it must be true). Really, it’s little wonder that standards occasionally slip.

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