I wonder what word our Leo Tolstoy had in mind in “War and Peace,” “lost the wolf” or something harsher? I take the English translation off the shelf, there it’s b——ed, apparently buggered, so it’s definitely “lost the wolf.”
Category: English
Navigating Translation Traps: A Dual-Language Reading of “Gone Girl” | August 04 2026, 03:14
Bought Gone Girl in English in Spain, very interesting, reading it. But I keep a Russian translation on my phone, so if anything difficult comes up, I don’t have to go to a dictionary, but to the translation. And after a third of the book read – blood from my eyes. I don’t know who can like the Russian translation – only those who haven’t seen the original.
Eng: I’m using this journal to get better: to hone my skills, to collect details and observations
Rus: Работа в журнале — временная, она нужна, чтобы оттачивать навыки, копить наблюдения…
Darn, journal – it’s a diary! If they meant “journal”, they use magazine.
Eng: Nick prides himself on his packing skills: He is (was) the loader of the dishwasher, the packer of the holiday bags.
Rus: Ник гордится своим умением укладывать вещи. Ведь он работал (как-то!) загрузчиком посудомоечной машины, собирал сумки для пикника.
Darn, worked as a dishwasher loader… Nick is Amy’s husband, he just helped around the kitchen at home.
Eng: Amy’s cell was being monitored
Rus: Банковская ячейка Эми под наблюдением
Darn, translator, cell [phone] – it’s a phone!
Eng: dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan
Rus: в конце девяностых закончила колледж и перебралась в Манхэттен
Translator, dropped out means she left college halfway through. Not graduated from college.
Eng: I have a dash of ADD, and I’ve always found my wife a bit dazzling
Rus: Хотя у меня есть такой грешок — все преувеличивать
The translator clearly didn’t catch what ADD is 😉 It’s Attention Deficit Disorder
Eng: We have a cold-cut tray if you want, sweetheart
Rus: Там есть лоток с колотым льдом. Если хочешь, бери, дорогой
Cold cuts – that’s sliced meat. The curiosity is intensified by the fact that a page later Nick himself says: “we mainly live on cold cuts” – the translator translated the same word correctly, failing to notice the connection.
Eng: The awakening was mechanical. A spooky ventriloquist-dummy click of the lids: The world is black and then, showtime!
Rus: Обыденный механический процесс. Как будто фокусник распахнул черный ящик. Только что мир окутывала тьма, и вдруг — бац! — свет
Actually, spooky ventriloquist-dummy translates as creepy ventriloquist, and lids – it’s the doll’s eyelids. What’s with the magician darn.
Eng: My life was alarmless
Rus: У меня вообще беспорядочная жизнь
Actually, the author plays with the word alarm (alarm/clock, alarm). Nick means a life without alarm clocks and alarms (alarmless). The translator, however, delivered an abstract “disordered life,” completely losing the author’s irony.
Eng: Greedy journalists with knowing smirks and hollow legs, getting the free buzz before they go somewhere better.
Rus: Жадные журналисты усмехаются и
переминаются с ноги на ногу в ожидании халявного хавчика и бухла — напьются-нажрутся и свалят куда-нибудь еще.
Let’s put aside hollow legs – it’s actually an idiom, meaning the ability to drink a ton of alcohol without showing signs of intoxication, but darn where does shifting from foot to foot come from?
Eng: I was a writer who wrote about TV and movies and books
Rus: Я привык зарабатывать писательским трудом, сочинять романы, сценарии для кинофильмов и телевизионных программ
AAA! Nick wrote about movies and books — he’s a journalist, a pop culture critic. In translation, he became a novelist and screenwriter, which directly contradicts all further text (he himself tells the police: “journalism, pop culture”).
Eng: So there it came, out of nowhere, as Rand begged for his daughter’s return: a killer smile
Rus: Вот она, откуда ни возьмись, улыбка, о которой просил Ранд. Улыбка, так необходимая для его дочери. Улыбка убийцы
Rand didn’t ask for any smile 🙂 he was pleading for his daughter’s return, and at that very moment Nick flashed a smile. The translator invented “Rand’s request,” ruining a key scene of the first part. Plus, the wordplay is lost: a killer smile — primarily “a knockout smile” (see urban dictionary), and the ambiguity here is Flynn’s entire trick.
Eng: …people whose brains don’t work quick enough to blog or link or tweet…
Rus: …недостаточно гибкие, чтобы уйти в блогеры и городить всякую чепуху…
Is this because Twitter got blocked? 🙂
Eng: You guys not close?’ she asked. ‘We are the definition of not close.
Rus: — Ну, парни, не пора ли закругляться? — спросила детектив. — По-моему, пора
It seems the translator got carried away with creativity 🙂
Eng: A number of women – friends of my mom’s, friends of Go’s – had invited Amy to book clubs and Amway parties and girls’ nights at Chili’s.
Rus: Кое-кто — подруги моей мамы, друзья Го — приглашали Эми то в книжный клуб, то на заседание общества «Американский путь», то на вечерний девичник в «Чилиз гриль-бар».
For the translator’s information, Amway is a cosmetics company, which nobody translates into Russian as “American Way” 🙂 And Chili’s is indeed formally known as Chili’s Grill & Bar, although it seems no one knows it by its full name. It’s just a roadside restaurant chain.
And so – the whole book. This is just what I’m listing next to where I decided to make notes with a pencil, and only then, when I looked at “how interesting this was translated.” When I realized that such good stuff comprised half the book, I stopped marking it.
Revamped Hybrismart: Engineering a Smoother E-Commerce Blog Experience | June 29 2026, 03:45
I completely redesigned and refreshed my hybrismart – an engineering blog about ecommerce. Yes, as you’ve gathered from this introduction, it’s in English. All 200+ articles have been revamped; no more style zoo, the font is easier on the eyes, illustrations are clickable, and there is now in-article navigation. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s enough to go public.
Search will be available. It’s already operational, but I temporarily hid it. Just need to finish it up.
A particular point of pride is the contextual article recommendation system. That is, next to a paragraph about drools, there will be a link to an article about drools explaining why it’s relevant in that context. On desktop, this will appear as a margin note, and on mobile, it will be an inset in the text.
The entire site is static and generated from markdown. Goodbye WordPress, you were very, very bad.
Navigating Simple English in “Project Hail Mary” | May 10 2026, 15:30
I’ve read about a quarter of Project Hail Mary so far. The English is very simple, easy to read, captivating; the movie so far follows the book closely, but still, it makes reading quite interesting. However, I generally find it hard to read fiction because I keep getting distracted to google stuff. I reached the phrase “..I used the bathroom (or “head” I guess, because I was on the ship)…” and it got me thinking, it’s interesting to learn that the toilet is called differently on a ship not just in Russian. And why “head”? Turns out that “galley” in Danish and German is “head”. Interestingly, galleys are also found on airplanes, and historically, galleys were used only by sailors; officers did not use them.
The text is very childish, and understandably so – the main character is a physics teacher at a school after all. All these motherfluffer and dang it, gosh darn it, fudge, holy moly, for cripes’ sake instead of for Christ’s sake, there’s even bull-puckey instead of bullshit. “To go wee” is how they say “to pee” in the book. I recall, the day before yesterday we entered a mattress store, and the consultant, while discussing the topic “if one of you goes to the toilet, the other won’t even notice that the first one got up” – well, because the mattresses are so soft – actively used the verb “to pee”. So what? 🙂
Update: when the physics teacher encounters an alien ship on page 120, the chapter ends with holy fucking shit! That’s what all the rest was leading to;)
Occasionally, there are quite funny expressions that can even be used in life 🙂 For instance, the main character asks, “Who pooped in your Rice Krispies?” which is the idiom “to poop in someone’s cereal” – “who messed up your meal”.
In conclusion, if you’re choosing your first book to read in English – this one is at the top of my list. Even something seemingly simple like “Harry Potter” is more sophisticated, in my opinion. Here, there’s a lot of dialogue, school level but almost slang-free vocabulary, and a pretty interesting plot. Plus, it’s real science fiction, where the author educates the reader about the scientific method, how the world works, etc., all from the viewpoint of the hero, a physics teacher, who shares various facts and thoughts on how physics works, relating it to the plot in his interactions with other characters or thoughts to himself (rather than directly to the reader). It’s middle school level so far, but maybe it’ll get more complex later on.
Exploring the Multifaceted Uses of “Oblong” in English and Russian | March 17 2026, 13:50
Sometimes in English, there are very unusual words that are very difficult to translate into Russian. Here, for example, is the word oblong. As an adjective, it translates as “elongated, oblong,” but in the book, both uses are nouns. Often oblong refers to a face – that is, close to an oval, but oblong is a broader concept that describes any figure having an elongated appearance. My mom bought an oblong tablecloth for her new table.
As a noun, it is also used, and quite frequently (though less so than as an adjective). As a noun, oblong means “a rectangular object or flat figure with unequal adjacent sides.” Rulers are considered elongated items (oblongs). Laptops, tablets, and flat-screen TVs are oblongs of different sizes. A rectangle can be defined as oblong; however, not all elongated figures are rectangles. The same face, for example. Additionally, in mathematics, an oblong number is what in Russian is called a rectangular number (the product of two consecutive numbers. For example, 12). In general, it’s utterly baffling.
The word has been alive since the 15th century, by the way. So, in my book, it appears twice, and both times as nouns. In the first case, Nabokov translated it as “corner,” and in the second – “a small oblong of smooth silver” as “a little piece.”
Exploring Multilingual Vocabulary in Nabokov’s Works with Apple Books | March 15 2026, 23:20
Man, it’s really convenient. Just sitting here reading.
The usage pattern is as follows: I hold the phone in my hands. There, in apple books, this and that book. You see an unfamiliar word – it will likely be in the word list of the chapter. The definition takes into account the translation by Nabokov himself. Then you look a couple words ahead, put the phone down, continue reading. You encounter those words, and they are still in your short-term memory, and hooray, you understand. During a break, you load the next couple of words into your brain. You have to hold the phone and flip through, each page contains 4-5 definitions.
Now, every word has definitions in English (interpretation), French, and German. Consequently, I can publish four books.
Overall, my level of English matches what my app predicts about which words will be challenging. But someday I’ll need the same for French, and it will require an assessment of the difficulty level for each word because even some basic words will be unclear to me. I’m not sure that a book with basic words will be handy. With rare ones – definitely handy.
Exploring English: Verbs, Misunderstandings, and Learning Through Contrast | March 06 2026, 23:57
About the English language. When Yuki sees another dog, he adorably places his chin on the ground and presses his paws to his face, but I have to tell him every time not to approach because once he lets them get closer, he suddenly starts growling and instigating a fight. And what verb would you choose for that?
Well, from school I knew that roar meant growl. And I even told everyone “roar” for the first week until I googled it and realized that in roar, it’s tigers, lions, and motorcycles, but for dogs, it’s growl or even snarl (with teeth showing).
Or take the phrase “cook food.” To cook comes to mind, but actually, to cook implies thermal processing (fire, stove). If you’re “cooking” a salad, tea, or a sandwich, a native speaker would say make. Saying “I’m cooking salad” is like you decided to boil it.
Or suppose you decided to watch a movie. In English, the choice of verb depends on where you are and how large the screen is. When you go to the cinema, you use the verb see. “Let’s go see the new Dune movie at the cinema.” If you say “I watched a movie at the cinema,” they’ll understand, but it sounds a bit technical, as if you were sitting there closely studying the screen like a security guard monitoring it.
But. When you turn on your television, laptop, or projector in your living room, watch comes into play. The verb watch implies extended attention to something on a smaller (relative to theater) screen. By the way, if the screen is off, you look at it (as an item). Once you turn it on and a picture appears, you start to watch it.
Generally, for an advanced level, it makes sense to attach each concept to a scale, to remember the words in shades of intensity. For example,
Cry -> Weep -> Sob.
Annoyed -> Irritated -> Angry -> Furious -> Livid.
Smile -> Chuckle -> Laugh -> Giggle -> Guffaw
Spitting -> Drizzling -> Raining -> Pouring
and so on.
And then further distinguish them by paired opposites, like the smile-cry from the example above.
It’s very easy to remember when put together.
But it’s necessary to try to apply them, otherwise it’s no good. Some words may be bookish, and here it’s important in what context it is said. If you told a friend in a pub: “I cannot comprehend this beer” – it would sound as if you’re writing a dissertation on that beer
Navigating the Confusion of Ergative Verbs in English | January 27 2026, 00:52
In English, ergative verbs cause me significant cognitive confusion. These are verbs that can be used in both directions: written, people change can be translated as “people change” and “people change themselves”.
For example, on the screenshot right now “illustrator will install next”. Somehow not will be installed next.
Or the sentence “she photographs well” is understood as “she is photogenic”.
“The book sold 1mln copies”, obviously not about the book’s ability to sell.
Decoding “Carboy”: A Journey Through Language and Autobiography | August 20 2025, 04:02
Rereading Feynman’s autobiography, this time in English, and my eyes stuck on the word carboy. It turns out that it’s the same as lady jeanne, and the same as demijohn – essentially lady jeanne in French (dame joanne). In short, it’s just a bottle.
The Crucial Difference Between “Honoree” and “Gonorrhea” | August 13 2025, 00:46
There is a big difference between “honoree is coming” and “gonorrhea is coming”
The main thing is not to confuse them
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 