Michele Berdy - More Letters to Choose From
Here is this week's column from The Moscow Times.Friday, September 29, 2006. Issue 3508.
More Letters to Choose From
By Michele A. Berdy
Азбука: alphabet, primer, basics
If anyone still needs proof that you should entrust your translation jobs only to qualified professionals, just look around Moscow. A new American film has opened with a tag line reproduced in big letters on posters and billboards, much to the puzzlement of Russians. It reads: Любовь -- это слово из четырёх букв. (Love is a four-letter word.) The problem with the translation is, of course, that a "four-letter word" is a swear word -- and more obviously, that the Russian word любовь has six letters.
Okay, so the translator was having a bad hair day. But how could dozens of editors have looked at that line and thought: "A six-letter word is a four-letter word. Yup, that's right. Print!"?
Other than sending me into deep depression about the state of translation, that tag line set me wondering about Russian letters in general. On the one hand, those 33 letters give foreigners lots of problems at first. On the other hand, there are plenty of synonyms and pronunciation systems to help the hapless non-Russian speaker.
Once upon a time буквы (letters) all had names in Russian. The first two were called аз and буки and gave us the word азбука, which means either the alphabet itself (today more commonly called алфавит) or a primer. Азбука can also mean "the ABCs" of something -- the basics. So the supermarket chain Азбука Вкуса is The ABCs of Taste. If you forget the word азбука, you can also call a primer букварь.
The proper way in Russian to describe a capital and lowercase letter is прописная and строчная, respectively, but people will understand if you ask: Слово пишется с большой буквой или с маленькой? (Is the word spelled with a big or small letter?) You can also use the phrase с большой буквой in the figurative sense: "человек с большой буквой" is "a human being with a capital H" -- that is, the finest example of a human being.
Alphabets are called кириллица and латиница (Cyrillic and Roman alphabets); for example, one web site tells you: Наберите текст латиницей, а потом программа переведет это в кириллицу. (Type the text in the Roman alphabet and the program will convert it to Cyrillic.) But you could also ask: Написать русскими буквами или английскими? (Should I write in Russian or English letters?)
If you don't understand a word, you can say: Скажите по буквам. (Spell it, literally "say it by letters.") Here it can get confusing. Most Russians agree on how to pronounce the letters at the start of the alphabet: they say: "а, бэ, вэ, гэ, дэ..." But they diverge on pronunciation towards the end. Schoolbooks tell you to say "эр, эс" for the letters "р" and "с," but often you'll hear "рэ, сэ."
If you get totally confused -- particularly when you're taking down a name over the phone -- the speller might switch to words that start with the letters in question. If you are, say, trying to find out where your lost baggage went, the answer might be «эр, и, эм» or it might be Роман, Ирина, Мария. In other words, your bags are having a fine time without you in the eternal city of Рим (Rome).
I now spell my last name in Russian: Борис, Евгений, Роман, Денис, Ирина. I used to say Берди -- как композитор Верди, только на "Бэ" (like the composer Verdi, only starting with a "B"). Once I spelled it that way over the phone to get a pass into a building, but when I arrived, no pass could be found. The kind woman went through the list again and again as I repeated my spelling routine. Suddenly she burst out laughing and held up a pass for Мишель Багнер. My great composers spelling trick had failed: Verdi turned into Wagner, and Berdy into Bagner.
Ольга, И краткое. (Ой!)
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based interpreter and translator.
posted by Kate @ 11:43 AM
3 Comments:
Правда! :-) Тысяч раз испытывала подобное. ЛОЛ
Не "с большой буквой", а "с большой буквы" - "пишется с большой буквы", "человек с большой буквы" (падеж НЕ творительный, а родительный в данном случае).
Между прочим, если вам вдруг понадобится заглушить чей-то сотовый телефон или другое средство связи, то воспользуйтесь для этого Блокираторы связи.
Post a Comment
<< Home