30.09.16 Students and the teaching staff of translation departments! Have a nice day and remember that yours is a mind-blowing profession! International Translation Day is celebrated every year on 30 September on the feast of St. Jerome, the Bible translator who is considered the patron saint of translators. The celebrations have been promoted by FIT (the International Federation of Translators) ever since it was set up in 1953. In 1991 FIT launched the idea of an officially recognised International Translation Day to show solidarity of the worldwide translation community in an effort to promote the translation profession in different countries (not necessarily only in Christian ones). This is an opportunity to display pride in a profession that is becoming increasingly essential in the era of progressing globalisation

29.09.16 Look at the following correspondence and the translation of it. The translator did a good job to use the device of omission though a lot of essential information has been lost.  In my opinion it was the right choice because the device of omission does not impair in any way the modality of the NYT message: Trump’s messenger is lying.  

squawk box – громкоговоритель, репродуктор

The news has been announced over the squawk box — Новость была объявлена по громкоговорителю The squawk box was strangely quiet through the night — Репродуктор всю ночь почему-то молчал

Conway then went on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and argued that Clinton, who was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, had never created a job and was partly responsible for the lack of adequate “roads and bridges” in our country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/opinion/trump-how-could-we.html?_r=0

Затем Конуэй выступила на CNBC и заявила, что Клинтон, с 2009 по 2013 год занимавшая должность госсекретаря, не создала ни одного рабочего места, и отчасти несет ответственность за нехватку в нашей стране «дорог и мостов» необходимого качества.

http://inosmi.ru/politic/20160928/237932962.html

23.09.16 Everything about these books implies authority, success story and creditability of the native speaker. At the same time the aggressive style of their advertizing makes an experienced teacher think that these polygraphic wonders contain nothing but a ruthless commercial project that shows itself clearly with such promises as "pupils can hold a conversation from the very beginning"...

22.09.16 The German idiom der „Russland auf Augenhöhe“ begegnen - встречать Россию на уровне глаз (literally) - устанавливать с Россией равноправные отношения - seems to be elementary common sense.  This is exactly the opposite to the policy pursued by the USA towards Russia since the days of "Gorby".

20.09.16  When we lose rhyme in the translation we lose part of the meaning of the whole message. "Trust, but verify!" is only a partial equivalent to "Доверяй, но проверяй!" It may be a humorous touch introduced by the personal playful context of communication between Gorbachev and Reagan: both of them appreciated a good joke and Reagan used Russian proverbs to this effect combining a serious implication with a playful stylistic background.

17.09.16 "There are many English-based creoles in the world, and many of them exist informally and with multiple variations ranging from quite different from standard English to very close to it. In some places, the creoles are the dominant language and have gained semi-official or official status and, with it, some standardisation. Tok Pisin is one such: it is an official language of Papua New Guinea and has about 120,000 native speakers and some 4 million second-language speakers. Tok Pisin began as a pidgin based on English with influence from German, Portuguese, and several Austronesian languages, but it gained native speakers who more fully elaborated it and made it a creole". Read the article to know more about it:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160811-how-english-gave-birth-to-surprising-new-languages?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook

15.09.16 "Languages are ever changing, mixing and mutating, and sometimes they give birth to new ones. Sanskrit gave birth to Hindi and others; Latin is ancestor to a set of languages including Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian; more recently, Afrikaans came from Dutch. But how about English? What will it give birth to?" Read the article to know more about it:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160811-how-english-gave-birth-to-surprising-new-languages?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook

13.09.16 A meaningful relationship between words and things they denote is always challenged with correspondences that do not maintain linguistic similarities but are kept together by some concept “out there” [Bellos, 2011: 24]. In the example below the implied concept may roughly be termed as weakness:

Putin may not have an economy, and his power projection capability may be held together with chicken wire and spit, but the delusions of his opponents have always been his chief tools.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/09/12/russia-re-emerges-as-a-great-power-in-the-middle-east/

У Путина нет экономики, а его способность проецировать силу держится на живой нитке и на соплях. Но заблуждения оппонентов всегда были его главным оружием.`       

http://inosmi.ru/politic/20160913/237832071.html

11.09.16 The Phoney War was an eight-month period at the start of World War II, during which there were no major military land operations on the Western Front. It began with the declaration of war by the western Allies (the United Kingdom and France) against Nazi Germany on 3 September 1939, following the German invasion of Poland, and ended with the German attack on France and the Low Countries on 10 May 1940. The Poles refer to the situation in Donbass (Ukraine) as the Phoney War (фиктивная, сидячая, странная война - in Russian it is one-to-many correspondences). http://inosmi.ru/social/20160911/237816922.html   

The article claims that the war is phoney because the President of Ukraine is paying taxes in Russia as the owner of the Lipetsk factory "Roshen" to the tune of the sum that keeps 82000 military in the Russian army.

7.09.16 The famous American political scientist Francis Fukuyama about the Ukraine. “Getting the dictator out is the easy part. The really difficult part is exercising power in a way that is legitimate and self-sustaining. Unless you make that transition, the Maidan Revolution is going to fail, just as the Orange Revolution failed.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/05/reforming-ukraine-after-maidan

self-sustaining able to continue in a healthy state without outside assistance самоподдерживающийся

"Self-sustaining" - clever, but that's not about the Ukraine!

2.09.16 "He was small in person but not in presence," student Trenton Bricken said in a Facebook post with a photo of him shaking hands with Putin. http://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/01/europe/putin-eton-schoolboys/  "Presence" - a familiar root, but it takes time to arrive at the equivalent, I suggest "Он небольшого роста, но с большой харизмой".  

1.09.16 A useful metaphor to kickstart the academic year at the Translation Department is used in the title of David Bellos' wonderful book "Is that a fish in your ear?" You may read about the origin of the metaphor here: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/30/trumps-tower-of-babble-translation-china-2016-campaign/