What's in a name?

[alexpgp]

One of the perennial thorns in the side of any translator working from Russian to English is how to deal with the names of various Russian institutions.

Take, for example, this gem I ran across this morning:

Федеральное государственное бюджетное учреждение науки Государственный научный центр Российской Федерации Институт медико-биологических проблем Российской академии наук

Literally:
Federal State Budget-Funded Science Institution Russian Federation State Scientific Center Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences

That whole "Federal State Budget-Funded Science Institution Russian Federation State Scientific Center" part up front is, in my mind, sort of like a drum roll, and I cannot avoid thinking of the kind of introductory preamble one might hear at some banquet-like occasion when the guest of honor is introduced, along the lines of:

"Please join me in welcoming this year's winner of the Brouhaha Award, the best-selling author of What is to be done?, renowned scholar, Olympic award-winner, twice-elected Municipal Dog-Catcher, all-round exemplary citizen..."

...eventually ending with said individual's name.

I have taken to moving all of that adjectival mess into a set of parenthesis and parking it after the name of the institution, as follows:

Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (a Russian Federation State Scientific Center and Federal State Budget-Funded Scientific Institution)

I think I need more coffee...

Comments

[bandicoot.livejournal.com]

It still sounds like the Russian Academy of Sciences has biomedical problems. Perhaps "Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Biomedical Problems" ??

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're right. I didn't notice this on my first glance.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Your suggestion is good. I think I changed my translation to what you suggest shortly after posting, but didn't feel the compulsion to carry the edit through onto LJ, as frankly, either version will work and for sure, either version is better than a literal rendering.

:^)

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good solution. (Both your translation and the coffee!)

[mkay422.livejournal.com]

Good job Alex.

On similar topic, I recently came across a pretty funny lost-in-translation case where the name "Институт белка" had been translated as "Squirrel Institute", instead of "Protein Research Centre". No kidding.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

I think someone may have been hitting the "Google Translate" bottle a little hard! :^)

Reminds me of a document I got, sent to my US client from Russia, in which a US address in California had the following city-state-ZIP line:

САКРАМЕНТО ПРИБЛИЗИТЕЛЬНО 95652

It turned out that the Russian document was originally an English document that had been machine-translated by the Russian side, which then made some changes to the text and sent it back.

The machine translation program apparently interpreted the abbreviation for California (CA) to instead mean "circa," a word typically used with dates and meaning "approximately."

That got my antennas tingling, it did!

Cheers...