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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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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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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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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