Forum: Author Hangout

I was reading the thread on English as a second language and thought about this. In my novel, I needed the Russian to say "Fuck you" in Russian. And I didn't want to use the Russian alphabet. I found one site that had it so that's what I used.

But I was chatting with someone from Iran the other day. She said the translators don't translate curse words. So I used Google to translate a curse word from English to Farsi. She said it meant something totally different and was not a swear.

So I went to sites that specifically had swear words. They were in the Farsi alphabet so I copied and pasted them and sent them to her. Again, they weren't what the English swear words were. Not even close.

So how do you do what I needed in my novel? (And I wonder what I actually had the Russian saying.)

So how do you do what I needed in my novel?

Find someone who speaks the language and have them give you the words.

Alternatively, use a Russian sentence in dialog and provide the translation. Then define that future conversations in Russian will only be presented in English.

This is more than just a translation issue, it's a cultural issue. What we would call a swear phrase in English is not always a swear phrase in another language, and that's also true for many sayings.

Each culture and language has a few phrases they regard as swear words and swear phrases due to associations from within the culture. While a few odd ones do cross the barrier, most don't.

Take German where two of their most common swear phrases translate into English as pig dog and thunder and lightning which sound like nothing to us English speakers when in English but don't expect smiles if you use the German words while talking to a native speaker of German. Likewise the French swear phrase that translate as sacred blue.

The best you can do is to speak with a person who speaks the language, present the situation, and ask them what would be said in that language in that situation, then use that.

When I first arrived in Australia, I was told to not use the word 'root' and to not use the 'thumbs up' sign.

In America, 'root' means to cheer. In Australia it means to have sex with someone.

I was told that in America, the 'thumbs up' sign means the person you gave it to did a good job, and in Australia, it meant fuck you (i.e., what Americans mean by a raised middle finger).

I needed the Russian to say "Fuck you" in Russian.

Yob Tvoyu Mat is Fuck your mother in Russia.
Ee dee Nah Hooy is Fuck you! - and you'd say it with emphasis.

Go to YouSwear.com for some other words. I took several years of Russian in college. Don't remember much of it, hated the Cyrillic language, but for some reason some of the words just sort of stuck. (Like learning how to say, where's the bathroom? I can do that in 5 different languages.)

So how do you do what I needed in my novel? (And I wonder what I actually had the Russian saying.)

When I was using a lot of foreign dialogue in "The Catalyst", I ran into this a lot. Your best option is Fivrr, where you can hire native-language translators for virtually any language. Automated translators are notoriously terrible! $5 a pop isn't onerous, and it's worth the expense just for the security of knowing the translations are reasonable.

Also, if you're using Russian for dialog in a story, it's more effective using the native alphabet, as it's a visually stronger reminder that they're not speaking English. I used that for Vietnamese, Russian and Arabic, and it works well.

There are a few things to remember, when using foreign languages, you need to stick with the 16-bit languages, ad 32-bit (ex: Chinese and Japanese) won't render well on most Western computer browsers. The other is to always code in UTF-8 character set, and to render the foreign language in html (rather than supplying the straight text. This is simple for me, since I use Dreamweaver, as I can copy the text from the code window and paste it into the 'display' window and it'll automatically convert it so it'll always display properly. (Hint: if you don't want to fork out the cash for Dreamweaver, send me the phrases and I'll convert them and sent them back so you can cut-and-paste them into your html code.)