AlexPGP's Corner

The word is one I haven't heard before and which Feht says isn't a real word: накоротке.

There's no entry for it in Multitran (although there is a phrase, "контратака накоротке" which is given as a military term meaning "hit-and-run counterattack"). My Oxford dead wood dictionary gives only an example: "произвести атаку накоротке" ("to carry out an attack at close range"), which gives накоротке an initial definition of "at close range," which doesn't work for the sentence I'm translating. So, it's back to Firefox.

The word appears often enough on the Runet, but short of finding a definition (no joy), the trick is to finagle a way (and there is always a way).

One of the Google hits is for an open source program called ++Sim that targets the IM segment and has the tagline "общение накоротке." Might there be an English equivalent? (Frankly, "messaging at close range" sounds pretty lame.) Hmm. I'm not allowed into the SourceForge page, so let's look elsewhere.

Aha! There's a forum post at something called huntclub.ru with the following (with my sight translation beneath):

Горизонтальный крупнокалиберный штуцер целесообразен для опасных охот накоротке (у нас - медведь на берлоге)

A horizontal, large-caliber short rifle is advisable for hazardous hunting <накоротке> (bears in their dens, where we are)

The title of the thread has накоротке in quotes, and suddenly, it occurs to me that I've often heard the phrase "up close and personal" in reference to hunting big game (there are, in fact, over 6,000 hits on Google for the search string "hunting bear 'up close and personal'"). Heck, it's almost a cliché.

There's not much to work with to check my hypothesis, but "Messaging up close and personal" seems to have a certain ring to it, and even better, it makes sense for the context in my translation.

Cheers...