Research is grand...
Sep. 27th, 2001 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpIt's a crying shame to see how obsolete my collection of paper dictionaries is becoming, especially my dictionary of abbreviations and acronyms. (I don't count the ancient document I own that summarizes the state of the known Soviet universe of abbreviations circa 1964; it was obsolete when I bought it and is only useful for historical purposes, but I digress...)
My latest tactic is to submit unknown abbreviations to the Rambler search engine, and it hasn't failed me yet (about 60 forays thus far), at least for commonly encountered abbreviations.
Take, for example, my attempt the other day to determine what "КРАБ" might be, standing in front of the name of a bank. What I find typically happens is that the first two screens of "hits" are of no help when doing such a search. In this particular case, it was even worse, as 'краб' denotes 'crab', which retrieved a number of interesting recipes, but no hits on banks.
I added the word "банк" (bank) to the query, and that got rid of the culinary items. My "first two screens are useless" rule held, and somewhere in the third screen, I found what I was looking for: коммерческий региональный акционерный банк (which I rendered as: commercial regional incorporated bank).
This technique does have its hazards, as I found two differing expansions for one other abbreviation I was interested in, though they were close enough for the difference not to matter. Too, just because one finds out what the words are in an abbreviation doesn't assure success in translating them. I'm still scratching my head over what a "унитарное предприятие" might be ("unitary enterprise"? pardon me while I spit).
One curiosity: While browsing the nist.fss.ru site, I ran across a link to "ЧаВо", which I clicked because I had no idea what it meant. Apparently, it appears to be an accepted abbreviation for "FAQ" (as in: "ответы на часто задаваемые вопросы").
A follow-up search on Rambler found over 34,000 references to this abbreviation (albeit in only 3227 Runet documents). I wonder how it originated?
Enough procrastinating. Back to work!
Cheers...
P.S. Note to self: This was redone in... IE5.5 as Mozilla does not let you submit Cyrillic inside of LJ posts. Blech.
My latest tactic is to submit unknown abbreviations to the Rambler search engine, and it hasn't failed me yet (about 60 forays thus far), at least for commonly encountered abbreviations.
Take, for example, my attempt the other day to determine what "КРАБ" might be, standing in front of the name of a bank. What I find typically happens is that the first two screens of "hits" are of no help when doing such a search. In this particular case, it was even worse, as 'краб' denotes 'crab', which retrieved a number of interesting recipes, but no hits on banks.
I added the word "банк" (bank) to the query, and that got rid of the culinary items. My "first two screens are useless" rule held, and somewhere in the third screen, I found what I was looking for: коммерческий региональный акционерный банк (which I rendered as: commercial regional incorporated bank).
This technique does have its hazards, as I found two differing expansions for one other abbreviation I was interested in, though they were close enough for the difference not to matter. Too, just because one finds out what the words are in an abbreviation doesn't assure success in translating them. I'm still scratching my head over what a "унитарное предприятие" might be ("unitary enterprise"? pardon me while I spit).
One curiosity: While browsing the nist.fss.ru site, I ran across a link to "ЧаВо", which I clicked because I had no idea what it meant. Apparently, it appears to be an accepted abbreviation for "FAQ" (as in: "ответы на часто задаваемые вопросы").
A follow-up search on Rambler found over 34,000 references to this abbreviation (albeit in only 3227 Runet documents). I wonder how it originated?
Enough procrastinating. Back to work!
Cheers...
P.S. Note to self: This was redone in... IE5.5 as Mozilla does not let you submit Cyrillic inside of LJ posts. Blech.
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no subject
Date: 2001-09-27 02:10 pm (UTC)