A stiff day...

Particularly if you are a muscle in my neck! I don't know what I did, but I've been walking around like Frankenstein's monster all day, trying to keep my head motionless with respect to the rest of my body. (Actually, it's impossible for me to turn my head more than 45 degrees to the left, so it's not all that difficult to maintain my head's spatial relationship to the rest of my body.)

That aside, Feht and I got to talking last night about a possible new mode of translation from Russian to English, where he does a "rough" translation of the Russian original into English (and is on hand to explain nuances and idiomatic expressions), while I then nail the final English text based on his initial translation and explanations. Our first trial took about 30 minutes and processed a little over 300 words.

Normally, this kind of volume is about par for the course for me working by myself, but then again, the text being translated wasn't dry, technical Russian, but something more along the lines of an op-ed piece, written by someone who evidently tries to put some style into his writing. So maybe 10 words a minute is not so bad...

Anyway, I'm not sure how successful we were, translating an excerpt from a piece by Lev Vershinin that someone had clipped from a paper and sent to Feht:

Сегодня, впрочем, ясно: события в Неджефе и Куфе менее всего похожи на то, за что их на первых порах пытались выдавать. Во-первых, слишком явственно торчат из-за недалекого бугра уши тегеранских режиссеров кровавого спектакля. Во-вторых, «героическая» партизанщина стремительно уступила место захвату мирных людей в заложники, «кукушкам»-снайперам на минаретах и складам шахидских поясов в мечетях. В-третьих, шейх Ас-Садр, сидящий на жалованье у аятолл, по молодости сболтнул лишнего, озвучил затаенную мечту спонсоров: любой ценой сместив упрямого и напористого Буша, заставить Америку закуклиться и спокойно, без спешки разобраться с Европой, а в перспективе и со всем «шариком».

Today, however, it is obvious that the events in Najaf and Kufa weren’t in the least what they were represented to be initially. First, the silhouettes of the Teherani stage managers of this bloody spectacle are all too visible behind the nearby grassy knoll. Second, the “heroic” guerilla struggle has sweepingly given way to kidnapping peaceful bystanders and holding them hostage, “cuckoo-clock” sniping from minarets, and storing suicide belts in mosques. Third, sheik al-Sadr, who is firmly in the pockets of the ayatollahs, has betrayed his inexperience and blabbed, letting slip the secret dream of his sponsors: to pay any price to unseat the stubborn and pushy Bush and to force America to turn inward and to calmly and slowly make its peace with Europe and, over the longer term, with the whole wide world.

There were, of course, some small liberties taken with the translation, as is the case with any such work, I would imagine. I found the original Russian article here; it's fairly interesting and (I think) uses the language well.

Today, however, represented a normal day at the office, with about 3,000 words of dry, technical, rent-paying text departing via the outbox for a couple of jobs, despite my stiff neck.

On a related theme: Anyone know of any good Slavic (and not necessarily Russian) restaurants in Toronto?

Cheers...