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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One of the tendencies in translation business is putting too much faith in translating machines and too little faith in the best reference resource, native language speakers. That the best translation programs may still mangle 20 to 30 percent of a text is no reason to abandon machines altogether. Take advantage of what they’re good at: translating obscure terms and speedily producing rough-draft renditions of sentences, paragraphs and bigger chunks of text. The tricky part comes once the machine is through, of course: you have to separate the wheat from the chaff – that is, отделить пшеницу от мякины, according to the Russian translation quickly found using Yahoo’s free Babel Fish translator.

As a well-known phrase with Biblical roots, “wheat from chaff” wasn’t much of a challenge for the program – and was easy  to back-check. But what about the Russian-to-English rendering of an everyday, highly idiomatic phrase, the kind a machine might easily mess up – like “Как ты меня достал!”, for example, which should come out “I’ve had it with you!”, “Enough already!” or something similar?

Babel Fish renders it “As you reached me!”, alas – but how can a Russian speaker quickly determine that this is off base? In this case apply another “program”: native English speakers or bilingual translators.

Cross-checking must be done judiciously, of course, as many cases are quite subtle or tricky.

All right, machines can do wonders for your translation powers if you check your expectations and back-check your results.

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Speaking about the Literary Translation, the best translations, those that actually get closest to the author in spirit, are those which do not stick close to the language details of the original, do not  ‘metaphrase’ or paraphrase, but rather those where the translator was willing to go a little farther off and find in his/her own language \ even if in words with somewhat different terrains and a different grammatical structure for the sentence/ a genuine equivalent of the complex ideas and tones of the author. What emerges is the one which is slightly more free is the best because the author is reliving the thought and feeling, really imagining it in his or her own mind and feelings and writing out of that.

1. Read the book and generalize the main idea and a concept.

2. Project this idea onto your own language culture.

3. Define the language means conveying the message.

Accordingly, before embarking on the rendering of a book a translator establishes a set of priorities to help shape it. To create a cultural context more suited to the target language speakers and avoid completely the common practice among translators- just translate the words of the originals- a translator has to do a lot of thinking and a lot of research.

“Like all translations, it’s just infinitely intricate. I always say it’s like opening up the back of a fine watch and getting in there with the world’s smallest tools.” (A Canadian playwright and translator John Murray)

While some problems with translations are common among all languages, translating from any Western European language to a Slavic one carries the additional problem of grammar. Slavic grammar is complex, and developed differently than in other European languages, which means that sentences have to be construed in a very different manner. Many of those things that are said with the use of idioms in English need to apply special grammatical structures in Russian.( More about idioms find in my recent posting)

It’s the kind of work you can only do with love. You have to love every syllable of the text. And you have to think everything that has to have meaning and resonance.

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Things Computers Can’t Do

- Language Translation

In the early computer days they started doing a research on language translation by computer for US government intelligence agencies mainly to translate everything that was being written in Russian. It came out as a failure.

With the present desktop computer and the default language translation service of Microsoft Word 2007, the conversion to Russian and back comes out a bit closer. That represents a half-century of progress.

With release of Ruby and Sapphire Guides on the coloured stone commission website the professional translation of those guides was strongly urged by the commission into the languages like Arabic, Chinese and Russian. If a gemstone dealer or gemologist would collaborate with a professional Russian translator, it would make the life of gemologists as well as dealers and antiquers much easier. People would always love gem stones, but they want to know what they buy. I am a professional translator, so I bought a guide in India. Now I am much wiser.

Russia is the largest country and is rich in natural resources that include oil, minerals, natural gas, coal, timber. While the population of Russia is diverse, Russian is by far the predominant language. With a decade of economic growth that has expanded its middle class, infrastructure improvements and manufacturing there will be a continued demand for Russian translator.

To meet the needs of an increasingly globalized economy, a professional Russian translator offers her services, including the translations of device manuals, user guides, product instructions and patents.

If your collecting (as an antiquer) or business activities involve working with people in other countries, like Russia, avoid being laughed at and do not depend on Internet computerized translation services. Do hire a professional Russian translator, preferably a native speaker of the target language.

To take advantage of the opportunities that Russia presents, you will need a Russian language translation company with fluent bilingual translation professionals – Smart-Translation.

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Translation is never an exact science.

There are few things more silly than a tourist in a foreign country with a foreign language dictionary trying to communicate with someone in their native tongue. It took years of study to master these languages and it takes practice to maintain them.

As a student I found out that there is no such thing as a word for word translation.

One must learn the proper idioms and then render English thought into Russian thought and vice-versa. Every language has unique grammar and syntax. German has a precise word order that accounts for time, place, and manner. However Latin and Russian, for example have loosely structured word order because case endings on each word determine the function of the word in the sentence.

Then there’s the trouble of conveying meaning. What good is an exact translation when the actual words fail to convey the intended meaning?

A statistical analysis is often of no help.

In any text or document, a statistical analysis will show that definite and indefinite articles, prepositions, and conjunctions will show up more frequently than nouns or verbs. It is simply the nature of English language. The statistical search for the true meaning of a word in this case offers no value. In such a phrase as “face to face” you have  two nouns, one of which is the object of a preposition. In languages that use case endings to determine the function of a word (such as Latin, Russian) in a sentence would not be readily apparent from a dictionary search. It’s like trying to look up a conjugated verb in a dictionary when what you really need to know is its infinitive. Using an online lexicon without a high degree of instruction in the language is almost useless.

How do juries choose between translations of very different kinds of books? Do they look for those that are unusually faithful to the original or for those that read as though they were originally written in the new language?

Translating plays must present a different set of problems from translating poetry. The dialogue has to sound authentic and yet has to convey more meaning than real speech does.

The question is often asked: “What got lost in translation?” Even if you’ve learned another language so well you can translate it into your mother language, can you ever know the nuances and the emotions associated with words and phrases that a child learns instinctively?

They say that Shakespeare is all about language, but his plays have always been revered in other tongues.

It is all about the feeling, something incomprehensible, I guess.

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There is nothing like working in another language and, because I am bilingual and can move back and forth, that allowed me to look at the Russian version with new eyes.

I would like to  talk about cultural aspect in translation today.

As a human translator I go from moment to moment, from revelation to revelation and grow less uncertain as I know how versatile the language is and the task of a human translator is to find the best possible compromise.

The most relevant part of my background is that I’ve always been fascinated by language. For me a novel turn of phrase or a well-sculpted sentence can be literally thrilling.

How playful, poignant, and convergent languages are! Every translation is a form of travel – to another place, to another time, to other worlds, to other people’s shoes, or to other people’s minds.

The word ‘idiom’ comes from Greek and means ‘one’s own’. An idiomatic expression is one that we understand among ourselves. Idioms are turns of phrases or expressions unique to a language. They are extensions of metaphors and similes, and often become immortalized as clichés. While they add flair to daily speech, they can also be problematic to a foreign speaker. The expressions are so tied within their own cultural connotations they sometimes sound absurd in translation.

We don’t pay them much attention, but idioms are more important than we usually realize. Linguists believe we have as many idioms and stock phrases in our long-term memory as we have words. They classify both words and idioms as lexemes (i.e., self containing units for conveying meaning). And idioms turn out to be a crucial piece of evidence in the surprisingly heated and ongoing debate on the evolution of language.

I am not pulling your leg or, as Russians would say: I am not hanging noodles on your ears!

A computerised English to Russian translation of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is ‘invisible idiot’.

As a human Russian translator I need to look for evidence in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, all of which adds to the inaccurate view of human reason.

Unless you are given a green light to a free interpretation of a given book.

Russian translation of some lyrics often diverge dramatically from the original version. While translating foreign songs a translator tries to create a literary story from the simplistic original text in the tradition of Russian romance where the lyrics always relate a story.

The decision to make Russia the market focus is a recognition of Russia’s rising clout in international publishing market. Russia now stands alongside the United States, China and the UK in world rankings. As a result a real school of translation will be created. Those who graduated with Russian literature and languages degrees, like myself, went to work in the business, where was a huge need for translators. So, there is an idea of fostering a new generation of translators (aged 30 and 40) to close a gap in literary Russian English translation. Academia Rossica awards the only translation prize in the world, which specifically recognizes excellence in translation from Russian into English.

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