15.06.14 BBC says:  "The United States condemns the attack on the Russian embassy in Kiev, and calls on Ukrainian authorities to meet their Vienna convention obligations to provide adequate security."

10 июня 2014 В категории "Методика перевода" (каталог статей) можно прочесть статью "ИНТЕРАКТИВНЫЙ САЙТ НА ИНЪЯЗЕ". Обратите внимание на библиографические данные представителей "Переводческих штудий", которые считаются главным направлением теории перевода на Западе.

3 июня 2014

Парные синонимы плохо поддаются переводу, если в них актуализируется одно и то же значение. Так, расхождение между illegal и illegitimate определяется, главным образом, наличием в последнем значения внебрачный, незаконнорождённый, но в переводе высказывания ниже контекст не позволяет воспользоваться дифференцирующим значением: прилагательные здесь выступают в роли абсолютных синонимов. Из новостей Би-Би-Си: Nato member states "repeated their very strong and clear position on the illegal and illegitimate annexation" of Crimea.

Возможны два решения:

1. Прибегнуть в переводе к приёму опущения и с помощью него ликвидировать тавтологию:

Страны НАТО «подтвердили свою твёрдую и чёткую позицию по отношению кнезаконной аннексии» Крыма.

В этом случае речь идёт также о приёме нейтрализации, потому что тавтология в нашем примере – не речевая небрежность, а стилистический приём, актуализирующий отрицательно-оценочные коннотации.

2)  Чтобы сохранить информацию и передать стилистическую функцию парных синонимов, приходится прибегнуть к приёму добавления:

Страны НАТО «подтвердили свою твёрдую и чёткую позицию по отношению кнезаконной и беспардонной (нецивилизованной, грубой, пиратской, разбойничьей) аннексии» Крыма.

Все приведённые варианты предлагают эпитеты, имеющие общее семантическое поле с естественным эквивалентом незаконной, но актуализирующие дифференциальные семы, которые обусловливают приращеня информации. Однозначно сказать, какой вариант более приемлем, нельзя, потому что как потери, так и приращения информации являются неизбежным злом перевода (особенно, если речь идёт об авторитетных текстах).

30.05.14 In “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (Act II. Scene II). Shakespeare coined the expression “The world is one's oyster”.  If the world is your oyster, you have the ability and the freedom to do anything or go anywhere You're young and healthy and you've got no commitments, so the world is your oyster.

In terms of formal equivalence the expression is easily rendered into Russian: мир – моя устрица. The translation is strange to the receiving culture because:

1) oysters do not make a traditional Russian meal;

2) the context is not helpful for decoding, because the expression verbalizes the reaction of the hero whose request for a money loan has just been turned down:

That’s why the translator has to resort to the foreignizing strategy at the lexical level, while resorting to the domesticating strategy at the grammatical level (transposition finds itself in the substitution of the statement of fact in the ST for the statement of the possibility of the fact taking place).

Пусть устрицей мне будет этот мир.

Его мечом я вскрою!

29.05.14 В каталоге статей (категория "Методика перевода") прочтите статью А. В. Теренина "СВЯЗАННЫЙ ТЕКСТ КАК ПРОБЛЕМА ОБУЧЕНИЯ". В этой статье рассматривается важнейший фактор организации информации: актуальное членение предложения (Functional Sentence Perspective). Транспозиции, связанные с актуальным членением предложения, традиционно относятся к наиболее уязвимым местам нашей переводческой подготовки: сплошь и рядом техника АЧ оказывается вообще за рамками переводческого комментария на экзаменах, что сразу ставит под сомнение претензию на хорошую оценку. 

26.05.14 Even the BBC sometimes blunders. In the video story "Ukraine's 'babushkas' in stand-off with separatists" they say: "A Ukrainian grandmother and her daughter have become YouTube hits after chasing away pro-Russian separatists in their neighbourhood". At the end of the story the women turn out to be threatened to swing on the ribbons (of St. George) that became a symbol of resistance in the East of the Ukraine. If the threat comes in this wording then it can only have emanated from someone who hates the ribbons. And it turns the whole story upside down. The women were berating people who are ready to desecrate the ribbons by using them for hanging... 

21.05.14 John Pilger (The Guardian, Tuesday 13 May 2014):

“For the first time since the Reagan years, the US is threatening to take the world to war. With eastern Europe and the Balkans now military outposts of Nato, the last "buffer state" bordering Russia – Ukraine – is being torn apart by fascist forces unleashed by the US and the EU. We in the west are now backing neo-Nazis in a country where Ukrainian Nazis backed Hitler”.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/13/ukraine-us-war-russia-john-pilger

18.05.14  I do believe that “the ballot is stronger than the bullet”, but the planned election of the 25th of May is pointless in the situation of the civil war. Candidates sympathetic to the Russian-speaking part of the Ukraine find themselves under the pressure of harassment, physical violence and outright blackmail. They can’t help stepping down from the presidential race. The “winner” – Poroshenko – is from the same pack of nationalists who are terrorizing the country now. Thus the so called election will not legitimize the government. It will quicken the split of the country.
What could save the unity of the country is the referendum on the new constitution held before the election. The constitution must incorporate two major points: the status of the Russian language equal to that of Ukrainian and federalization. I doubt that the movers and shakers who preach ‘winner take all’ ideology are ready for dialogue. That’s why the outcome is clear: Poroshenko is president, the disintegration of the country is given a boost. As a citizen of the country I used to cast my ballot. This time it has no point. The guns must stop firing, Ukrainian troops must be pulled back and sent to the barracks, the interim government must start talking to the “separatists”. The stick won’t help, let them start thinking about the carrot. The people who rule the rooster are really shallow and stupid people. They are capable of making speeches and throwing brave slogans. I do not see a real leader among them. An arrogant, shortsighted, selfish, predatory, corrupt, lying and thievish bunch… Deplorably, the West gave a go-ahead for the so called election.

16.05.14 I found it a bit puzzling when euronews descibed Conchita Wurst as "a drag performer" since the expression can hardly be defined as neutral. According to lexicography, two expressions cannot coexist as neutral (there are rare deviations from this rule). In our case  "female impersonator" is neutral while  "a drag performer" is stylistically marked.  The underlined words prove that my line of thinking was correct: the description given by euronews is potentially dangerous because it is ambiguous in connotations. 

 Here is a comment by an American friend of
A. B. Yunatskaya who has kindly contributed it to me:

 Drag just means a man that dresses as a woman. "Drag queens" dress very extravagantly, and might even be entertainers (do you know the French movie "La Cage aux Folles"?). For homophobic people, any reference to someone as gay, including drag, is considered an insult, as they disparage that lifestyle. I think transvestites don't consider "drag" as pejorative, rather just descriptive. I think it would be used in the media. It is often used thusly: to dress in drag, to be in drag, to go in drag (to attend an event). I think it is only used for male to female cross dressers. Women who dress obviously as men are "butch." 

13.05.14 Henry Kissinger, the guru of the American politics about Putin: "He spent $60 billion on the Olympics. They had opening and closing ceremonies, trying to show Russia as a normal progressive state. So it isn't possible that he, three days later, would voluntarily start an assault on Ukraine. There is no doubt that this is sort of a response to what he conceived to be an emergency situation".

9.05.14 Accept my heartiest congrats on the Day of our Victory in the Great Patriotic War. It used to be the most revered holiday day in this country. For many people it is still so. And there are quite a few of those who are eager to change our history and sow poppies in our mind.  Some even go so far as to substitute the Ribbon of St George for poppies as the symbol of the Victory Day. The Ribbon of St George, one of the most recognized symbols of military valour in the Great Patriotic War, the symbol that for years has been cherished in the Ukraine, is now relegated to an emblem worn by pro-Russian “separatists” in eastern Ukraine. This symbol used to be hated and feared by the Nazis. Now it is being hated and feared by the care-taker government in Kiev. This is a glaring fact testifying to the nature of “democracy” that is being promoted now.  

6.05.14 The US and EU spin doctors  label  all people inside Ukraine opposed to Kiev  as 'militant separatists' while real separatism comes from the spin doctors themselves, the Kiev junta and Ukrainian mass media. 

5.05.14 "What Julia Ioffe Got Wrong About Stephen Cohen" by James Carden (3.05.14) contains an admission that runs contrary to the mainstream of the American mass media: "The preference of Western cheerleaders of the Euro-Maidan for a coup d’état over an orderly transition could not have been clearer to the fringe elements who resorted to violence in Kiev in February". It takes a resort to many modulation devices to arrive at an equivalent piece of translation:  Западные болельщики Евромайдана ясно дали понять экстремистам, бушевавшим в феврале в Киеве, что они предпочитают переворот организованной смене правительства. 

Compare it with a more natural or fluent translation: 

Экстремисты Евромайдана, организовавшие беспорядки и переворот в Киеве, получили ясный сигнал для такого рода действий от своих западных покровителей.