Some people are just stubborn...

And that's all right by me! (Heck, I'm probably a charter member of the club!)

I've kept on making suggestions for English terms going into Russian on ProZ, and it seems no matter what I say, or what arguments I marshal, I'm not the fellow anyone listens to.

Now, that could just be a function of my being the "new guy" on the block.

Or, it could be something darker, but I'm not in the mood to consider that just yet.

Or, it could be just plain stubbornness.

Take for example, the term "condensator fan motor."

"Condensator" is a poor formulation for "condenser"; that was agreed to early on by all the parties to the discussion. So now we're dealing with a "condenser fan motor."

Then the fun began.

I weighed in first, arguing that the item in question was a motor that spins a fan that blows air across a condenser (a heat-exchange device that turns vapor to liquid), and suggested "привод вентилятора конденсатора" might do the trick in Russian.

Wouldn't you know, all my colleagues seem to have fixated on "condenser" as somehow referring to a capacitance in the motor. (One went so far as to define a condenser as a device that humidifies air, if I read the description correctly, but still arrived at the capacitance idea. Go figure.) As for me, the last time I saw "condenser" used to describe what is now commonly called a "capacitor," I was still in high school (many moons ago).

I went to the mat on this one, if for no other reason than to provide some diversion from the bone-crunching, mind-numbing experience of translating Excel files originated by someone from the very shallow end of the gene pool.

In the end, the selected variation was "конденсаторный вентиляторный двигатель" (capacitor fan motor).

In the final analysis, translating "condensator fan motor" into Russian is a risky business any way you look at it, given the questionable flavor of the source text plus the lack of any additional context.

Nonetheless, my conscience is clear. If anything, I believe this just might be a convincing counterexample to those theorists who claim that one should never translate into one's learned language (i.e., out of one's native tongue). I believe it is my native understanding of English that contributed to my point of view.

The end result can also be partially attributed to a tendency among some non-native English speakers to believe they understand the language better than native speakers, but that's a rant for another time. :^)

What's more, I've got this KudoZ business thoroughly out of my system, now. In fact, I look forward to having a lot of fun with it in the future.

Oh, yeah... all those Excel files are on their way back to the customer! (And that makes my... morning!)

Cheers...

Best kudos I could get...

No caps, and no "z" at the end.

After the choice was made, I posted one last message, giving a Russian reference that clearly established a "condenser fan motor" to be what I had maintained it to be.

In the aftermath, the original asker of the question sent me a very nice e-mail in which he thanked me for my persistence in standing up for my point of view. In fact, he said, he finally had come around to my version of what the phrase meant.

His last line really got to me:

"Permit me to thank you for a lesson in professionalism and thoughtful work."

I am a sucker for kind words.

Cheers...