Me'n my big mouth!

[alexpgp]

I had to mention that I was just ripping through today's translation, didn't I?

So, as a reward, the section I was working on came to an end, and I went from 90 to 0 in 3.2 seconds, decelerated by some very unforgiving geological, hydrological, and soil terms. Words so arcane they appear in ones and twos on the Internet at all!

It's hard to select a representative text that humbled me (there's so, so much of it!), but here's a try. Words I didn't know - and which have no easy definition - are shown in boldface:

С учетом условий залегания по рельефу, гранулометрического состава, характера типодиагностических горизонтов выделены почвы: агроземы темные насыщенные среднепахотные глинистые сильносолончаковые в комплексе с агроземами темными насыщенными среднепахотными тяжелосуглинистыми среднесолончаковыми 10-25 %, агроземы темные насыщенные среднепахотные глинистые среднесолончаковые, органолитостраты легкосуглинистые среднесолончаковые.

The following soils can be distinguished, taking account of modes of occurrence with respect to relief, granulometric composition, and nature of typodiagnostic horizons: dark, saturated, moderately arable, clayey, strongly saline agrozem, in a complex with 10–25% dark, saturated, moderately arable, massively argillaceous, moderately saline agrozem, with dark, saturated, moderately arable, clayey, moderately saline, and slightly argillaceous agrozem, and with moderately saline organolithostrata.

I'm sorry: organolithostrata??? Sounds like an updated version of a play by Aristophanes.

And this, a mere 220 words before coming to the end of today's text!

Cheers...

Comments

[brenk.livejournal.com]

Alex - having done lots of stuff on hydrogeology and soils science, I found 'agrozem' to look a bit - er - Russian. So googled a while and came up with this:
http://www.ldd.go.th/Wcss2002/papers/1330.pdf
It calls it 'agrosem' - try a word search in the .pdf file, as there's a lot about what these soils are.
There's also a French company called 'Agrosem' which deals in soils, etc.

I think I'd also go for 'organic lithostrata', as you do see 'organic strata'.

Mind, you've probably found all that. Just me being nitpicky.

I have an earth sciences dictionary (but French-English) which cost a FORTUNE, but has words I had trouble finding on the Net too. If you want any English terms checking, yell?

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info.

I settled on 'agrozem' mostly because I increasingly got the feeling that this was one of those terms - like 'oblast' - that can survive as a transliteration because it describes something unutterably local, combined with an inability to find a translation. (Though I did find a Czech company called 'Agrozem' that's mentioned a lot on the 'net.)

There are a couple of other words, too, that I seem to be ending up translating, because although I can find definitions for them, I can't find translations. One of them, if memory serves, is 'ilmen' which I believe is an local Astrakhan name for an ox-bow lake (if my Dal can be trusted), but none of my E->R dictionaries will support me on that.

Thanks for your input. I plan to review the PDF as soon as I put more coffee in my system.

Cheers...