27.12.15 Faculties of foreign languages start celebrating Christmas long before the 7th of January - the official date in the orthodox church. I am not much of a believer: I have never been an atheist, and. on the other side, I've never seen wonders in my life. People usually turn to god when they have no hope in anyone else. In the secular society of the USSR people used to start the long row of holidays on the 24th of December. Our faculty had a certain logic in its claim to the 24th of December (in this way we are learning the culture of the English language speakers). Other compatriots of ours had none.
 But now this holiday is used in the Ukraine as an anti-Russian event. Some Ukrainian politicians even go so far as to offer dumping the 7th of January Christmas in favour of the "civilized world" Christmas. It's a matter of the Church, the laymen had better not poke their nose into it!
May you meet the New Year and Christmas celebrations with your loved ones in happiness and blessed serenity!

The latest comments

1.12.14 A list of new additions to OED may be found at http://public.oed.com/the-oed-today/recent-updates-to-the-oed/march-2014-update/new-words-list-march-2014/

28.11.14 Avoid people who insist on communicating in highfalutin gobbledygook!!!

English has many colloquial expressions that may be used as shibboleth to identify a foreigner. The 7th chapter of "the Crusaders" by S. Heym describes the interrogation of a man who wears an American uniform and has American papers on him, but who fails to decode an abbreviation familiar to any GI and finally admits to his being a  German spy. The abbreviation is TS - from tough shit (a widely used colloquial idiom now: 1) Tough shit! — Ничего не поделаешь! Tough shit, buddy! — Что ж, тебе не повезло 2) You flunked the English exam? That's tough shit, fellow. I got kicked out altogether — Ты завалил английский? Мне бы твои заботы, приятель. Меня вообще выгнали tough shit tough shit (or titty) vulgar slang used to express a lack of sympathy with someone

Spin doctors and other idioms

The translator’s competence is determined by two things: by the stock of ‘natural equivalents’ in their memory and by the ability to produce equivalents with the help of different devices (transposition, modulation, particularization, generalization, compensation etc.) when ‘natural equivalents’ are missing. ‘Natural equivalents’ are presumed to exist between languages prior to the act of translating and are very important in the process of professional training.

Memorize one of the informal buzz expressions of mass media ‘spin doctor’.

Its Russian correspondences offer such ‘natural equivalents’ as:

1)  спиндоктор (transcription),

2) пиарщик (transcription + morphological adaptation),

3) политтехнолог (rewording and explicitation),

4) эксперт по связям с общественностью, прессой (обеспечивает подачу информации в СМИ под нужным углом зрения) (explicitation, neutralization and secondary explicitation by means of the translator’s commentary in brackets).

Translation, manipulation and "The Manipulation School of Translation"
 

Farewell, kids!

Последние полтора месяца сорокалетней карьеры.