Cory Doctorow’s Someone comes to town…, Russian translation, part 4

The translation is performed under Creative Commons license.

Кори Доктороу, “Кто-то приходит, кто-то уходит” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Translation into Russian: Maria Veter
Editing: Tania Samsonova, Konstantin Anikin
Перевод на русский язык  Марии Ветер
Редакторы – Татьяна Самсонова, Константин Аникин

- Ну что у нас тут? – спросил Алан, входя в мастерскую Курта, которая успела превратиться в жизнерадостный бедлам.

Huh?

I saw the following ad on proz.com:

“We have been asked to possibly provide some transliteration for a client.
It is a project which would entail taking software code (US) and translating code into Russian for their central bank processing.”

They want a translator to do WHAT?
The poster has an amazing mess in his/her head.

They do not distinguish transliteration from translation. For those less familiar with these terms, transliteration means rendering a word in the characters of another language preserving the actual word. Contrary to what some people think, transliterating a word does not instantly make it understandable by the speakers of the language with target character set. I mean, if you transliterate Russian собака (a dog) into English, it will become “sobaka” and not “dog”. Translation, on the other hand, means that a word is replaced with a word from another language, e.g. “dog”->”chien”.

And how on earth can you translate source code? “For central bank processing”, not less? Evidently, if a source code undergoes either of the two procedures I described (transliteration or translation), it will compile no more. Amazing. Do the authors of the job post really think that “these Russians” have their very own special programming language in Russian, so, for a software to work in Russia, its source code must be transliterated/translated into Russian? (From “US language”, I have no doubt.) And a very own Russian compiler to go with it. With a built-in central bank.

An article about the A.S.Byatt symposium I went to

http://www.news.leiden.edu/news/loss-or-gain-the-art-of-literary-translation.html

Some functionality Amazon is missing

Just something that occurred to me recently while I was looking for this book to buy it online. (I needed it for my translation work on “The Children’s Book” that is full of references to British mythology; the book was recommended by ASB herself.) I found the book at amazon.com for $70, and decided I cannot afford it. Then I entered it into my wishlist but that did not help a lot. Finally a good and kind soul checked amazon.co.uk for me and, hoorray, there it was, for $20, including shipping.

This simple story made me believe there are two important pieces of functionality that Amazon is missing.

1. There should be an option for the people to contribute small amounts towards somebody’s wishlist. Right now, if I am not mistaken, if I want to buy someone a gift from their wishlist I can only splurge for the entire book, which can be tricky if the book in question is expensive. It is much easier for 5-10 people to contribute smaller amounts. This would be especially convenient for groups of friends, relatives etc. who want to give an expensive item (think rare editions, anniversary gifts etc.)

2. There should be an option for searching “other Amazons” if the book is not at amazon.com. Right now you have to do it manually: go to amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk and so on which is a) non-intuitive and b) tedious. It would never occur to me to look at amazon.co.uk if it were not for that friend’s kindness.

My list of literary translations as of today

English->Russian

Daily worries

Just got news from British Centre for Literary Translation that they are not going to sponsor my trip to Netherlands because I live in Canada and not Russia, even though I work on the Russian translation of the book. (It does not seem fair, as Canada is much farther and my travel expenses will be even higher than if I traveled from Russia, but that’s international bureaucracy for you. My publisher certainly will not sponsor my trip, and the money I get for the entire book translation are hardly going to cover the cost of the trip.) Now I’ll write to Canadian Council of the Arts and the Ontario one too. I’ll get to Leiden anyway, it’s just that it would be nice for a change to get someone sponsor the process of global cultural exchange.

A.S.Byatt, “Children’s Book”

I’m going to Netherlands in February, for A.S.Byatt “Children’s book” translators’ conference, yay!
ASB almost got the Booker’s prize for this book, but it did not happen (Hilary Mantel got it for “Wolf Hall”). But Leiden University is giving ASB a Honorary Doctor degree anyway, and we are all invited to the ceremony. We’ll probably make a trip to England (I will for sure) from Holland, to visit the V&A Museum in London, as most of the book’s plot is wrapped around the Museum. ASB promised to join us there as well!

Hackers and translators

I read this essay by Paul Graham, and suddenly it occurred to me that most of what he says about hackers is applicable to translators as well. What we do is hack words, or with words, to achieve meaning.

Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers. What else can painting teach us about hacking?

One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the example of painting is how to learn to hack. You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking. Most hackers don’t learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn to hack by writing programs of their own at age thirteen. Even in college classes, you learn to hack mostly by hacking.

Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can watch them learn by doing. If you look at the work of a painter in chronological order, you’ll find that each painting builds on things that have been learned in previous ones. When there’s something in a painting that works very well, you can usually find version 1 of it in a smaller form in some earlier painting.

I think most makers work this way. Writers and architects seem to as well. Maybe it would be good for hackers to act more like painters, and regularly start over from scratch, instead of continuing to work for years on one project, and trying to incorporate all their later ideas as revisions.

The fact that hackers learn to hack by doing it is another sign of how different hacking is from the sciences. Scientists don’t learn science by doing it, but by doing labs and problem sets. Scientists start out doing work that’s perfect, in the sense that they’re just trying to reproduce work someone else has already done for them. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. Whereas hackers, from the start, are doing original work; it’s just very bad. So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.

The other way makers learn is from examples. For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques. For hundreds of years it has been part of the traditional education of painters to copy the works of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made.

Writers do this too. Benjamin Franklin learned to write by summarizing the points in the essays of Addison and Steele and then trying to reproduce them. Raymond Chandler did the same thing with detective stories.

Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs– not just at what they do, but the source code too.

The complete text of Paul Graham’s essay is here.

Literary joys

I have completed translation of Terry Pratchett’s Nation (it is now being edited), and have started The Children’s Book by A.S.Byatt. It is huge – 600 pages, about the same size as Iris Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil which I have translated last year. The Children’s Book was shortlisted for Booker prize. Translators from half a dozen countries are working on it right now, and I have been included into a mailing list for The Children’s Book translators worldwide, with participation of A.S.Byatt herself. By the way, this Wikipedia article says that A.S.Byatt was actually influenced by Murdoch, and that the novelist Margaret Drabble is her sister, which  I did not know before. I read something by Drabble and I thought she writes, in fact, very much like Murdoch, but more… drab. The pun is intended. In my opinion, The Children’s Book is not like anything by Murdoch at all, at least I very much hope so. I will not survive another 600 pages of dark and depressive stuff like The Philosopher’s Pupil. The Children’s Book story is not all roses either, but at least it’s less… existential? and more lifelike. The work on it will be pure joy, anyway. Life is good.

Cory Doctorow’s Someone comes to town…, Russian translation, part 1

The first 48 pages of the book. More will follow (hopefully soon). The text is still pretty raw, it will be edited later. Anyone who wants to help with the translation or editing is welcome. (My email is on the “Contact me” page.)

The translation is performed under Creative Commons license.

Кори Доктороу, “Кто-то приходит, кто-то уходит” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Translation into Russian: Tania Samsonova

Editing: Konstantin Anikin

Перевод на русский язык  Татьяны Самсоновой (Боровиковой)

Редактор – Константин Аникин

Восторженный отзыв

“Кто-то приходит, кто-то уходит” – не просто замечательная книга. Замечательных книг на свете много, но эта – нечто большее. Это замечательная книга, ничего подобного которой вы в жизни не читали.
Джин Вулф

Кори Доктороу

Кто-то приходит, кто-то уходит

Роман

Посвящение

Семье, в которой я родился, и семье, которую я выбрал сам. Оба раза мне повезло.

Роман

Алан ошкурил весь дом на Уэйлс-авеню. Это заняло полгода, полгода аромата опилок, древнего и сладкого, полгода вони растворителя и сырого запаха ржавеющих стальных мочалок.

Алан въехал в дом 1 января, заплатив сразу всю стоимость переводом электронного золота. Пришлось повозиться с риелторшей – провести ее за ручку через весь процесс открытия счета и работы с электронным золотом, но Алан обожал заниматься подобными вещами, сидеть рядом с неискушенным новичком, шаг за шагом руководя щелчками мыши, вводом текста, заполнением форм. Алан любил разродиться импровизированной лекцией о базовых принципах подобных операций; он вывалил на бедную риелторшу дюжину ссылок о природе международных рынков валют, о значении драгоценного металла как некого общего финансового языка, на который можно перевести любую валюту, о поэзии полок в бронированных хранилищах банков по всему миру, где высятся груды тяжелейшего металла, тускло сверкая в свете люминесцентных трубок, а вокруг хлопочут гномики-банкиры – они говорят на сотне языков, но общаются друг с другом на универсальном языке весов, мер и проб.