Eating humble pie (sort of) and liking it...

I've undertaken a new set of assignments that have me clawing at my dead wood dictionaries for the first time in, literally, years. (And sometimes, even they are of no help.)

A while ago, I ran across yet another puzzle: a heading that read "встретили по одежке" (which I initially thought was a misprint for "встретили по одежде" because I had no idea that одежка was a word).

The literal meaning is "they were met on the basis of their <whatever одежка means>."

Multitran doesn't have an entry for it, nor does my dead wood Katzner. My dead wood Oxford says only that одежка is a diminuitive of одежда, and shows it being used in a saying, where it was rendered as "coat."

I then passed the phrase past Galina, to get the native speaker's point of view. "Aha," she says, "и провожать по уму."

I do a marvelous double take. "Huh?" I say.

"It's a saying," she says. "It means that when people first meet you, they judge you by your appearance. Afterward, when they say good-bye, they judge you by what's in your head."

I checked my dead wood dictionary of Russian idiomatic expressions and sure enough, there it was.

It ain't rocket science, but it'll probably be educational.

Cheers...

Looking for the right word...

It occurs to me that translating "Встретили по одежке" isn't as straightforward as it might seem.

The entry for the idiom in my dictionary provides a starting point, suggesting that "по одежке встречают," when used by itself, means "people judge you by appearances."

That's well and good, except "Judged on their appearance" doesn't convey what is meant, I think. Other tries that incorporate встречать (being met, received, etc.) sound awkward and unwieldy.

Returning to the dictionary, I begin to suspect the key lies in the reiteration of the word "first" ("first time," "first impression," "first meeting"). Who is it that you meet for the first time? About whom do you form a first impression?

I am seriously leaning toward translating the heading as "Greeted as strangers."

And now, I have really spent an inordinate amount of time on three words, and I haven't even gotten through half of today's modest goal for this assignment (900 words).

Cheers...

Mercy!

So here I've been working for about 5 hours and have made about as much progress as I used to make back when I started translating. I blame the fact that the language is not technical, but literary (if you fuzz your eyes sufficiently).

The "bad" thing about technical translation is having to understand (i.e., learning) enough about what's going on to write about it using the proper terminology (resistors are connected "in parallel" and not "concurrently"), but if you already have a technical bent, the learning curve is fairly short. Once you get a handle on the terminology, you get to enjoy the good thing about technical documents, which is that there are no metaphors, similes, alliterations, rhetorical questions, or other devices (though there are rare exceptions that smack you squarely between the running lights with their obviousness).

Literary (or broadly speaking, non-technical) text typically requires both a deeper knowledge of vocabulary, idioms, and slang as well as a feel for how various devices are used to express subtle intentions. Then there is "register" to consider, which is its own separate brush fire.

A prime example of this difficulty was the "Встретили по одежке" that I overanalyzed in the previous two posts. While I stand by my assessment that "Greeted as strangers" is a workable rendering, it turns out that my decision was strongly clouded by what I had already translated. The text that followed the heading actually did discuss how someone's clothes had affected their participation at a meeting, so "Judged by appearances" is starting to look pretty good at this juncture, but I shall exercise my prerogative and let the issue hang until I do my review.

That being said, I need to take a power nap and start on 4,000 source words of the contract due Thursday. I'm going to be playing catch-up on that project all week.

Cheers...

Another 14-hour Friday...

This morning's intellectually stimulating session gave way to an afternoon and evening of mind-numbing work translating a contract that seems overly one-sided in favor of the buyer.

I had noticed, when doing my progress word counts, that the last part of the OCR output was a bunch of not very useful numbers, so after truncating the OCR output to 65 of 82 pages, I find I currently have 11,500 source words left to translate, which means I ought to be able to finish up through page 65 by the end of the day Monday, leaving me sufficient time to go through the last 17 pages "by hand," so to speak, and to review the whole document before sending it back to my client.

That means my decision to stop work for the day after translating 3300 source words of the contract (and about 900 words of the other item) is a good one, especially in light of the fact that my productivity over the last hour or so has dropped dramatically.

* * *Snow on the driveway would not have prevented me from leaving to go to my T'ai Chi class today, but it would've well and truly kept me from coming back up the driveway afterward. Gravity is, after all, an irresistable force. Based on a stroll down to the mailbox and back, I estimate we got between 4 and 6 inches of snow last night and today.

* * *I picked up a set of VocabuLearn tapes at the library the other day, for French. The instructions are not very explicit, but I gather that one is supposed to listen to the 6 tapes that come in the set. (Duh!)

The tapes are devoted to types of vocabulary (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.) and the content consists of having native speakers alternate saying individual vocabulary items in English and French (with the order of the languages reversed on the opposite side of the tape).

I've only listened to one tape, with no ill after-effects (but that's probably because I already knew about 90% of the words). I can't wait to see if I am reduced to a quivering bowl of Jell-O after any of the other tapes.

But now, it's time to close up shop and get out of the office.

Cheers...