On the final day of Russian English month, freelance translator and interpreter Alexander Dron shares some of his experiences as interpreter with us.

Thank you for all of you who have contributed to Russian English month!

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My most recent ordeal on TV was a press conference following a meeting of European finance ministers which discussed ways to contain the euro crisis (“anti-contagion measures”). The slogan was fiscal consolidation. I remember deciding if I should win time and translate it literally and thus puzzle and jar on the ears of so many Russian viewers, or fall behind the fast speaker, giving each time an explanatory translation (“reducing state budget deficit and state debt”). Besides, in Russian, it is so much longer. Yet, I opted for the latter. Simultaneous interpreters are constantly having to make such split-second decisions. What would you have done in my place?

Another thing to think about is Germanic vs. Latin English. If your audience are native speakers of English, your knowledge of Germanic phrasal verbs may come in handy (not necessarily Eliza Doolittle’s “to do in”). One presidential adviser said at a conference: “We were waylaid”. I did not know the exact meaning of the verb. Neither did my distinguished partner who was translating at the time. Yet, everybody knows its “French” equivalent: “We were ambushed”. Indeed, live and learn!

Consecutive interpretation is different. Many Russian executives speak some English and try to monitor what you say. One minister, a sophisticated speaker of Russian and an enthusiastic speaker of English, said something which, in the context of the meeting, was a bold statement, and which I interpreted as “The key thing is to create a level playing-field”. He “corrected” me by saying in English: “No, the most important thing is to create equal conditions for all”.

British vs. American English usage is a great subject to pursue. I will confine myself to sharing a perfectly untranslatable joke (told by my teacher and colleague Prof. Alexander Schweizer). A US and a British general are watching a military exercise. The first one says: “Some fight!” To which the other general says:”And others don’t”.

As I walked from the park where I drafted these notes, I saw two unusual creatures. I asked their mistress what breed they were. “Whippet”, she said, malaya angliyskaya borzaya (“small English greyhound”), bred for racing. “What are their names?” – “Nazareth and Samuel” plus a host of ancestors’ names. “But I call them Nazar and Semyon, or Syoma, or Syomochka”. A unique case of coexistence of English and Russian names. One is a former Moscow racing champion. “And the other one?” – “He is more of a dandy”. “Do they still race?” – “They are old, 11 and 12.”

The whippets did not only add a new word to my vocabulary; they did not only provide an ending to my notes. They seem to be a metaphor of my life and work.

Our final Russian English guest post this month is from Uliana Urubzhilova. Uliana has been living in the US for three months. She’s studying at the International Academy of Design and Technology (IADT) in Florida, majoring in Fashion Merchandising. She graduated from a university in Russia last summer and has an equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree in linguistics.

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When I started my education at IADT, I realized that I lacked specific words and terms to do with the fashion industry. So I started to pick up new words all the time. Besides, I noticed that there were many English words which sound like Russian but whose meanings are different. Here’s one example:

velvet Russian – velveteen English
velvet English – barkha Russian

Such words, which are also called false friends, confuse me sometimes. But when in doubt, I always check in a dictionary. The most difficult assignment for me is to write up research in English. It takes a lot of time to find the right words, since there are a lot of examples of such false friends. Another problem has arisen recently: I learn a new English word, I understand its meaning, but I don’t know its Russian equivalent. It happens with some names of fabrics and terms. Here only a specialist dictionary can help.

And finally I would like to tell a story which happened to me a week ago. I was told to buy a sewing foot. I asked my fellow student whether I had to buy a pedal for a sewing machine or something like that. But the sewing presser foot appeared to be a part of a sewing machine which exerted downward pressure on the fabric as it was fed under the needle. Its Russian meaning points on its small size, which is achieved by the means of a suffix:

lapa Russian – foot English
lapka Russian – small foot English

So, such interesting language phenomena always draw my attention from practical and theoretical points of view.

To mark Saints Cyril and Methodius Day, which commemorates the creation of the Slavic Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, we have a guest post by Biljana Naumoska, Senior Lector in English at the Department of English Language and Literature, “Blaze Koneski” Faculty of Philology, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia. Biljana holds an M.A. in English Linguistics and is currently working on her PhD. Her fields of interest are: morphology, lexicology, semantics, methodology, the history and development of the English language, academic writing, British and American history and civilization.

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I love the English language. In fact, teaching English is my livelihood and I love teaching others to love it as much as I do and to help them understand and appreciate the wonderfully creative and unlimited potential the English language offers: the great variety of phrasal verbs, the rich vocabulary, the grammatical structures, the spelling system, the interesting and diverse idioms, proverbs.

It goes without saying that as a result of careful and long-term language planning, English is nowadays accepted as an international language, the lingua franca of the modern age. Thus, there are accepted varieties now such as Spanglish, Frenglish, Japlish, and Denglish, a combination, or a mix of English and Spanish, French, Japanese, and German, respectively, where English components and English vocabulary have been introduced into the said language. However, there is a phenomenon taking place in the Macedonian language that I honestly fail to see the reason for, and that is the persistent and relentless massacre of the Macedonian language through the use of English. Namely, it seems to be ‘in’ or fashionable nowadays to replace perfectly good Macedonian words, words that are neither archaic nor old-fashioned, with words from the English language. To make the irony even worse, this trend is further supported by public personae: journalists, singers, actors and TV hosts, people who have wide audiences and who have a significant amount of influence on the young. I cannot understand the logic behind the need to anglicize the Macedonian language to such an extent, and overnight at that.

I understand and accept the fact that this influx of English vocabulary makes the language more expressive, but what is the reason behind replacing perfectly acceptable Macedonian words with English equivalents? To make matters worse, sometimes both the Macedonian word and its English equivalent are used together, as if they represent two different notions! So, are the Macedonian words less worthy? Inferior? Do the English equivalents carry more weight? Are they more expressive than the Macedonian words? Does using foreign words and phrases make people think they sound intelligent? Educated? Sophisticated? Different from others? Maybe, but carried out to the extreme seems to defeat the purpose and only achieves the opposite effect. How can you sound different from others if everybody else is doing it for the very same reasons?!

Yes, it is a fact that a great many people in Macedonia know English to some degree. It would not be incorrect to also say that English has practically reached the status of an unofficial second language in the country. For example, the great majority of job announcements, if not all, require that the potential applicant has some level of proficiency in English, and in fact, some job announcements go so far as to appear in English only, or with a very brief note in Macedonian.

Certainly, there is no need to be fanatical in terms of wanting to keep the language, any language, ‘pure’, i.e. to only accept and use those words that have origins in that particular language because then the language is not given the opportunity to grow and develop. Languages evolve and encompass words and expressions from neighboring languages and the culturally dominant language. The English language itself is an amalgam and consists of numerous borrowed words from other languages and that does not appear to have had a harmful effect on its development at all, quite the contrary, in fact. However, in my opinion, there is something very disturbing and unnatural in not valuing and appreciating your own mother tongue so as not only to allow it, but also to encourage it to be suppressed and undermined. All languages have their own characteristics that make them special and unique, different from other languages. Those differences are in no way a bad thing; in fact, they provide diversity, and diversity is what makes and keeps things interesting.

In conclusion, I am going to repeat what I said at the beginning, but slightly modified. I love the English language. Teaching English is my livelihood and I love teaching others to love it as much as I do, and to help them understand and appreciate the wonderfully creative and unlimited potential the English language offers. However, I also love my native language, my mother tongue, Macedonian, and I do not, for one moment, think that using English words will make me sound smarter, more interesting or better. The meaning is in the content of what is said, not in the form. In order to fully love, understand and appreciate other languages, you have to first love, understand and appreciate your own. The point is to keep what is yours and add to it, enrich it, and not to destroy everything that makes you unique or change it beyond all recognition.

Over on Facebook we asked fans to translate – word for word – sayings from their language into English where the translation really doesn’t make sense in English. This turned out to be quite entertaining for a day at the office, and I’m sure there is a lot more fun to be had in this area.

I’ll admit it may only be fun for a certain type of language lover: one without better things to do? Anyway. I’m bringing across the Russian ones from the ‘What’s your English?’ Facebook page as it’s Russian English month. There are others which you may want to look at.

The first Russian saying:

Julia Bay
from Russian:) would you, please, be so kind as to give me some water … because I’m so hungry that I even have no place to stay for the night …

And the second:

Nastya Yandulskaya
- Do you want some cake?
- Yes, no, maybe …

If you’d like to add your own, please post a comment to this post.

Our first Russian English guest post is from Yuliya Melnyk, an ESL teacher and journalist originally from the Ukraine. After more than 10 years of teaching English at the Kirovohrad State Vynnychenko Pedagogical University, Kirovohrad, Ukraine, Yulia enrolled into a grad school in journalism at the University of Missouri-Columbia, USA. She started her career in journalism in North America and currently, she works as a freelance journalist and Russian/Ukrainian translator.

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Ukrainian is the official language in my home country, Ukraine, but many regions of the country still prefer Russian as the main means of communication. Unfortunately, languages are too often used in political games, but we, linguists, educators, teachers and students understand the value of language, first of all, as a unique phenomenon which must be respected, learned and appreciated.

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, changes in the post-Soviet societies and their languages took place in front of our eyes. We got access to authentic US press, to Western books and original movies, and native English speakers came to teach English at our universities. The influence of English became obvious.

Of course, there were English words in Russian in the Soviet period: we pronounced girlfriend, boyfriend, weekend and happy end almost in the same way as they are pronounced in English. However, nowadays we see a completely different type of influence; it is very strong and new words from English are becoming ubiquitous. Many of them are connected with the field of computing. Some of them are used without changes, e.g. upgrade, browser, e-mail, mailbox, provider, hacker, chat, user, etc. Many new words in Russian come from the field of economics too, e.g. coupon, voucher, broker, etc. Post-Soviet countries opened their borders and became a part of a global economy.

Many words are produced in Russian slang every day; they have English roots and Russian affixes, e.g.: mastdait, which means ‘criticize’, comes from English must die and smailik from smile (as in smiley, the sigh used in e-mails and text messages).

Sometimes we use a common Russian word with a new meaning. For example, mylo means ‘soap’ in Russian, but we say mylo in spoken Russian meaning ‘e-mail’, because mylo and e-mail sound similar. Young people’s speech is full of English borrowings, including Wow!, cool, dance and others.
Large Russian-speaking communities are spread all over the world and their members speak Russian mixed with borrowings. Newcomers usually borrow words which refer to food, accommodation, jobs, etc. Even those people who have only recently arrived in the USA start using many English words in their Russian speech, e.g. landlord, porch, backyard, deposit, rent, insurance, workshop, cheesecake and others.

It is great that we have an open society and can visit different countries, communicate with different people and read many books. But as a linguist and teacher I would like my Slavic people to value their mother tongue and avoid unnecessary borrowings.

It’s Russian English month, yay! I have almost no experience with Russian or any other Slavic language so I have spent some time collecting some interesting links and reading articles, blog posts etc that in one way or another address the topic of ‘Russian English’ or ‘Slavic languages and English’.

The reason we thought May would be a good month to focus on Russia is that the 24th of May is Slavonic Literature and Culture Day which, as it says, is a celebration of Slavonic literature and culture, as well as the Cyrillic alphabet. And, being the language lovers that we are, we like to get behind any sort of celebration of language.

Anyway, here are the links – some of the articles are quite dated, but still interesting!

First of all: Renglish! This is a “an alternative method of writing English using the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets invented by Slacknet Communications, who spent a few months testing and perfecting the Cyrillic version with help from several Russians and a Serbian”. Get a handle on Renglish yourself.

A Slovenian teacher (and I wish I could make contact but has proven thus far to be impossible), username: mitjakus, has posted his thesis on Scribd for all to see. It’s entitled ‘Words of Slavic Origin in the English Language’. Interesting comments follow it too.

Another publication by Maria Polinsky looks specifically at American Russian: Incomplete Acquisition American Russian. (Beware: heavy reading):

“This paper examines American Russian, a language variety that is endangered in that it is unlikely to stay around for generations, but does not come to mind as obviously endangered because it is associated with the healthy varieties of Russian spoken in Russia and in the growing Russian diaspora …”

BBC news has touched on the subject of Russian borrowings of English words and The Telegraph has an article here on ‘Runglish’. (Does anything else besides Twitter lend itself more easily to forming blends than the word English?):

“First came Franglais. Then there was Spanglish. Now start getting used to Runglish, the English-laced argot of “kool” young Russians …”

In an article grandly titled ‘Mass Media Influence on the National Language in the Epoch of Globalization‘, the author notes:

“Following the tendencies of the past years English words are very widely used in Russian mass media even though there are appropriate Russian equivalents. This can be illustrated by the following examples: konversiya from English “conversion” instead of Russian “preobrazovanie”, stagnatsia from “stagnation” instead of “zastoi”, consensus instead of “soglasie”, image instead of “obraz”, pluralism instead of “mnozhestvennost’ mneniy”, prezentatsia from “presentation” instead of “predstavlenie…”

So, lots to get through babes and babushkas. Happy reading!