= Сообщение: 7139 из 12550 ====================================== ENET.SYSOP = От : Robert Bashe 2:2448/44 24 Jul 18 10:04:08 Кому : Alexey Vissarionov 24 Jul 18 10:04:08 Тема : z1 pointlist FGHI : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:2448/44+5b56e2a2 На : area://ENET.SYSOP?msgid=2:5020/545+5b564646 = Кодировка сообщения определена как: CP866 ================================== ============================================================================== Alexey Vissarionov wrote to Robert Bashe on Tuesday July 24 2018 at 00:19:
RB>> I am unfortunately not fluent in Russian, although I studied the RB>> language in graduate school nearly 50 years ago
AV> OMFG! Rob, I'm very sorry to ask, but... how old are you? 70 or so?
I'll never see 70 again, Alexey. 76 going on 77. And believe me, you feel your age, particularly when you're dealing with technical matters.
AV> Well, being 40 y.o. I've started to learn Chinese (and even got some AV> tiny success), but you seem to be significantly older.
40 isn't a bad age to learn Chinese, except that you might have some problams with the tones (there are 6 of them, and some are very hard to distinguisch). The pronunciation isn't hard, but depending on the tone you give a word (all the Chinese signs represent one word - it's not an alphabetical language like anything derived from Latin or even Russian). That makes Chinese difficulkt to learn for westerners (and I include Russians). There is a "simplified Chinese" which helps beginners and many Chinese, but the tones remain. I've recently read that it's better to learn spoken Chinese than written Chinese but I have no experience in that. We learned written and spoken Chinese together in graduate school.
RB>> and did some technical translations into English. But my guess would RB>> be that Pasternak, if anyone, could do an excellent job of RB>> translating English literature.
AV> Most of our translators did that. Obviously enough, to translate AV> poetry one needs to be a poet thyself.
Precisely. And the same applies to technical work. What many people don't realize is that a translator has to _understand_ what he translates. The words alone aren't sufficient.
RB>> To my shame, I am simply not capable of comparing Russian RB>> translations to an English text. And particularly Rusian translations RB>> of literary English. That's about as complex as things get. I do have RB>> to admire, once again, your command of the English langusge. I wish RB>> my Russian were even a tenth as good.
AV> You are welcome to come and practice :-)
Ne znayou, graschdanin (phonetically written, as I can't write cyrillic).
RB>> I only speak English and German, and a bit of French.
AV> I wish I were such a polyglot... Well, I can understand (and, after a AV> week or so, speak) any Slavic language and most of Germanic (excluding AV> Scandinavian), but I still have a big gap in German :-/
German isn't the easiest language to learn for English speakers either. The genders of nouns, and of course the usual confusion with prepositions is rough. But at least German is generally pronounced as it is spelled, in marked contract to English, and I'm told in Russian as well. An examplke of the latter would be the pronounciation of "God" (Bog), pronounced variously depending on the context. Bosche moi! ;-)
