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One of the few bright spots in Chris Weitz’s screenplay for the Golden Compass were the lines spoken by the villainous Tatars. Just before the final battle begins, Lyra walks up to the line of armed men with their daemon wolves and spits. The ringleader answers by saying to another man, “Дай волчонку полакомиться.” “Set your wolf on that child,” go the subtitles and that’s probably what Weitz wrote for someone to translate. The actual Russian: “Treat your cub to a snack.”

Business as usual in Hollywood is to render dialogue into dismal Russian the likes of which would be never uttered by a native speaker. I bet if you compared the actual Russian spoken in most American movies to machine translations, the machines might win. Then again, maybe the comparison is nonsensical. Maybe the machines have been doing the translations all along–what, with the studios skimping on paying the writers at every turn and now with the strike. You don’t have to go farther than the last season’s Heroes Odessa storyline to see what I mean (though I reserve the right to blog at length about this in the future). In any case, after years of twitching in my theater seat, when I heard Weitz’s Tatars, I was thrilled. That moment made the movie for me almost worth the price of admission.

But how evil the Russian Empire is in the story. In our world, Tatar is still a living language. In The Golden Compass, not even a trace remains. Between themselves, the Tatars speak only Russian.

Lest you think the problem is at its worst on this side of the Atlantic, here’s a site [ru] I’ve unearthed recently about the glitches of English going into Russian. One poster talks about the movie Fangs and the way the name of its town of Scottsville has been merely transliterated rather than translated into Russian. Ergo, instead of something like Scottish-Town, we are offered the city of Скотсвил–or Swineville.

Another user points out [ru] how thoroughly the trailer for Sweeney Todd has been–pardon the pun–butchered on one of his DVDs. “How about a shave?” becomes “Not bad for a name.” The translators came up completely short when they heard “about him” come out of Helena Boheme Carter’s mouth: the best they could do was turn the phrase into a proper name, Bakhim.

Bakhim, Google tells me, is a company based in Ufa, which, of course, is a city with a population roughly a quarter Tatar….

In Tony Blair’s reshuffle of May 2005, the Department of Trade and Industry was to be re-branded as the Department for Productivity, Energy and Industry - before someone pointed out what the acronym Productivity, ENergy and Industry Secretary spelt.

One of Gordon Brown’s first acts as Prime Minister was to rejig the DTI, giving it the new name: the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform - or DBERR for short. Again, the name change has caused problems - although not for reasons of prurience this time. […]

“Many computers recognise the letters as code for ‘database error’ and a huge amount of confusion is being caused.”

Via.

23D. Seven letters. Tight-bodiced dresses

“Dirndls,” Mrs. Cohen and Shortz? Really?

One of the most common ways to tease an Eastern European in America is to mention the number of consonants languages like Polish and Ukrainian string in a row. “How do you pronounce those names, anyway?” I’ll tell you how: say “dirndls” twenty times, then try reading a last name like Polarski. Something tells me three consonants in a row will suddenly seem like nothing.

All joking aside, the word is derived from the German dirne, or a girl, and its derivative, dirndlkleid. So at least the British, once the vogue for the dresses began, had the sense to skip some of those beautiful consonants.

Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning what gives every indication of being pencil-like tools from short, thin sticks and then using them in a manner suggesting to researchers that the chimps are in the early stages of acquiring the skill of writing — the first routine production of writing instruments ever observed in animals other than humans.

Via.

Русские умельцы 11 века могли построить избу, имея при себе только топор, или построить корабль без единого гвоздя. Древние традиции унаследовал автозавод Москвич.

Or, in English:

The Russian master craftsmen of the XI century could build a loghouse with just an axe or a ship without a single nail. The ancient traditions are inherited by the automotive plant “Moscovite.*”

* Russian car brand

As you might imagine, that statement is a conversation killer.

“So, what are you working on?”

“A novel about the man-made Ukrainian famine.”

“Ah.”

It only gets better when I say: “It’s a comedy.” Which it is. In places.

The usual response is an arched eyebrow. Most people have trouble picturing the topic as being funny. I find it hard to picture it as anything else. It’s a man-made famine. How could the logic of the “man” in question be anything but absurd?

Here are some examples. These are some of my research notes from one of the chapters in Robert Conqust’s The Harvest of Sorrow.

Catch-22. By late autumn, any peasant not yet swelling up from hunger was deemed suspect by the Party. His or her home was promptly searched for food. If any were found, it was taken away.

After a directive from the Politburo that any attempts to damage state agrarian property (like crops, animals, and food rotting in store houses) were to be punished by an immediate execution or a ten year sentence, a teenager was arrested for cavorting with a girl in the stable. The charges said he was disturbing the pigs.

When the villagers piled the corpses of their dead in the streets, it was treated as a kulak demonstration. The famine did not exist. The corpses did not exist. And if they did, they came from the kulaks.

Irony: Stalin wrote a letter justifying the suffering of the villagers by claiming that the “bread-workers” were the ones who had tried to murder the Red Army by hunger. The food requisitions were merely meant to stop them from committing the crime. I gather we no longer have to wonder who gave Stalin the idea.

Some of the requisitioned food was kept in storage houses. It began to rot. That’s when the bureaucrats took over. When the potatoes rotted, for example, they were transferred from the Potato Trust to the Alcohol Trust. I imagine there were quite a few papers for some poor cog in the machine to stamp. I also imagine that after the Alcohol Trust still did not use the rotting potatoes, they were duely transferred to the Compost Trust.

Lastly, but not leastly, there was a Party activist who, after being pestered by center for more food from his village, told them the only way he could meet the meat quota was by requisitioning corpses. The young man disappeared shortly thereafter.

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