Category Archives: Eng

Posts and pages in English

Eng, Positive stuff, Translator's work

Localizer’s best friend

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You don’t have to be a localizer to use this nifty plugin from transposh.org. However, what you do need, to localize your website into one or more languages, is knowing the target language (s) well. It is best if you translate into your native language. It’s often referred to as “mother’s tongue”. And you must honestly answer to yourself a direct question – after re-reading your final edit): “Does it really look and sound natural?” It should. Otherwise, google, bing or many other MT (machine translation) engines should be all we needed.

Being a professional Russian translator with over 40 years’ experience, I found it extremely easy to quickly generate translations of my own pages. I have used many CAT (computer aided translation) tools before, but Ofer’s offering (sorry, couldn’t help it) was the fastest, easiest to learn and use. In short, Transposh beats them all hands down. Even though the other guys ask hundreds and even thousands piastres for their goodies, and Ofer doesn’t even take donations (at least, as of today).

Using the Transposh on this blog was a piece of cake. Installation was pretty straightforward and everything worked as it should right away. The only inconvenience I found so far is inflexible segmentation of translation units and punctuation marks. Russian is a much lengthier language than English. Punctuation marks are used differently. But even those are not a huge problem for someone who loves to play with his native language, knows it well, and can twist words around. The biggest problem other early adopters found in this application was a US flag instead of a Union Jack to denote English in the language menu. I agree with what Ofer answered to their accusations and can add something he couldn’t afford: “Fuck you! You fucking fucks!”

Conclusion: I am happy I switched to WordPress from Drupal (on this site), if I didn’t I would be clueless about Transposh. This will be my favorite toy for a long time. I will tell all my trusted friends what a nugget I found.

Hats off to Ofer Wald!

One and a half years later (this article was first published May 24, 2011).

I had to remove this module because it overloaded my database to the point that my host provider disconnected my server. It took us nearly two months to figure out the problem. Sorry folks. You’ll have to use off-the-shelf shit like Google Translate if you don’t know the language but want to read my shit.

😉

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Eng, Photography

Photo Album

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While organizing (digitizing) my photo archives, I noticed that The Beatles were always part of my extended family.

The first two years of my service in the Soviet Army, I was stationed right outside Moscow, and we sometimes visited the city supervised and accompanied by our officers. Here we are ‘fraternizing’ with some civilians. “Народ и армия едины!”

A small passport-size picture of my friend Tatiana Vyrzhikovskaya is right in the middle of Fab Four's shots.

All those pictures were made by some resourceful entrepreneurs from smuggled western, Hungarian, East German and Polish magazines. They made money selling them to music lovers like me.

Prices were fixed. This "Postcard Album" as it was officially called cost 40 rubles.

I scanned several shoeboxes of pictures taken by non-digital cameras, covering my whole life prior to 2000. That’s when I bought my first digital camera – Olympus C-3000 Incredibly, the total size of my high-resolution scans was less than 7GB. Can you imagine your whole life can be recorded on a 32GB MicroSD card and there will be room for several more lives?

whole life on finger tip


How fucking pathetic!

 

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American life, Eng, Positive stuff, Travels

Angel

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Mark cooked it just right! I hid from the afternoon drizzle inside Randy’s apartment, and was cautiously ‘chewing’ on my steak using my gums when she came up and leaned to hug me. I had no clue who she was but hugging her back was so natural… Like I knew her all the time. Maybe I did?
Because she’s an angel. Yes, it’s official folks: I now have my very own Florida angel (forgot to ask her about flood and hurricane coverage). To make it simple for me, she said her name was Angel!

In addition to a personal angel, I now have a couple dozen friends from Singer Island, Florida. As my angel says:
🙂 Keep Smilin’

P.S. Since Angel is an American, my name is a bit of a problem for her to memorize (let alone pronounce), so she knows me as Bob.
🙂

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Eng, Humor, Reading, Translator's work

Candor

1 Comment

“While translation, I am always striving not only towards the sense transfer, but also the original style keeping, as well. Of course, the retaining of original formatting and the fulfillment of client’s wishes and/or requirements are out of question.“

Priceless! Seeing such honesty after sorting out tons of bullshit in candidates’ resumes and CVs is so-o-o refreshing. 🙂

 

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Eng, Positive stuff, Video shooting

Oudov Presents

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There are few videos about today’s Russia that make me feel good. This is one of them – filmed/directed/sound engineered and produced by Sergey Oudov, my schoolmate buddy from DLI, Moscow. He devoted his whole life to serving in Soviet Spetsnaz, but he could have become a great film director. Or camera man… Anyways, thanks dude! I have had the best 15 minutes of my recent life watching your video:

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Eng, Joys of my life, Music, Video shooting

Italian music

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Gray is beautiful. Blue and gray are even better. And you cannot beat the gentle surf sound. I often go to Edmonds just to listen to it. This time, on the way back, just before turning into my driveway I stopped and took a short video of my neighbor’s fantastic illumination. She’s increasing the number of lights every year…

In the end of this video you can see/hear that Italian pop music is not limited to Adriano Celentano, and Ricchie e Poveri who are still played on Russian radios every day. In fact, you can tune in to any of the thousands of Italian stations and enjoy every single song played there. I do!

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Analysis, Eng, linguistics, Translator's work

Verbosity

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I am sick and tired of Russian verbosity. Here are just a few examples of what they say and what they really mean. Recently heard on the radio and television news and sportcasts, where one would expect maximum brevity, conciseness and minimum vagueness:

1 Внешнеполитическое ведомство – External Policy Agency
2 Северная столица – Northern Capital
3 Зеленый континент – Green Continent
4 Административный центр Баварии – Administrative Center of Bavaria
5 Главная площадь страны – The Main Square of the Country
6 Стоимость углеводородов / Цена на углеводороды – Hydrocarbons price
7 В качестве главы кабинета Ее Величества – In the capacity of the Head of Cabinet of Her Majesty)
8 Венценосные особы – Crown-wearing persons
9 Туманный Альбион – The Foggy Albion
10 Страна кленового листа – The Maple Leaf Country
11 Страна утренней свежести – The Country of Morning freshness
12 Страна восходящего солнца – The Country of the Rising Sun
13 Поднебесная – The Celestial Empire
14 Страна тысячи озер или Суоми – The Country of a Thousand Lakes or Suomi
15 Футбольная столица Англии – Football capital of England
17 Четвертое (первое) игровое сочетание форвардов – 4th (1st) game combination of forwards
18 Нападающий команды страны тысячи озер – Forward of the Team of the Country of a Thousand Lakes
19 Обесшайбил финского спортсмена – ‘De-pucked’ the Finnish sportsman
20 Положил игровой диск в ворота страны тысячи озер – Put the playing disk into the goal of the country of a thousand of lakes

Sometimes it sounds plain ridiculous but that is the way they talk these days… Below are the meanings of the above samples of Russian “slovobloudie”. This is what they mean, in human-readable language::

1 МИД – State Department (in US), Foreign Ministry
2 Санкт Петербург – Saint Petersburg
3 Австралия – Australia
4 Мюнхен – Munich
5 Красная площадь – Red Square
6 Цена на нефть – Oil price
7 В качестве премьер-министра – As Prime Minister
8 Королева и ее муж – The Queen and her husband
9 Англия – United Kingdom, UK
10 Канада – Canada
11 Корея – Korea
12 Япония – Japan
13 Китай – China
14 Финляндия – Finland
15 Манчестер – Manchester
17 Нападающее звено – Offensive line
18 Финский форвард – Finnish forward
19 Отобрал шайбу у финна – Took the puck away from the Finn
20 Забил шайбу финнам – [player’s name] scored

Small wonder Russian translations of English source texts are up to 40% lengthier than the original text. In translation industry we call it “expansion”. I can at least understand the motives of a translator who inflates the number of “target language” words, but why does a sports commentator do it?..

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