The Russophile has put together a comparison of the top free online Russian translation services, pitting his own human translation against offerings from Babelfish, Google, and World Lingo.

Unsurprisingly, the computer translations are no match for the best that humanity can offer, but I was impressed nonetheless by their quality - a massive improvement on a couple of years ago.  It’d be interesting to see how far ahead of Babelfish, et al the professional translation software is, or whether the stuff you can get online for free is as good as it gets for now.

By the way - if you want to see some really bad machine translation of Russian text, check out Copydude’s article - Achy Breaking News.

One of the joys of writing siberianlight.net is the random stuff I find while searching the net. Take this piece of Star Trek fan-fiction I found today on Technorati, for example, in which Capain Kirk takes a trip down memory lane and (almost) visits Siberia’s finest city:

“That is correct, Colonel. Our captain has been taken into custody by what appears to be a Soviet military unit.” Spock barely moved as he spoke. “If my suspicion is correct, they may believe Captain Kirk to be an American espionage agent. If this is so, then his life is in grave danger.”

Steve’s face grew somber. “That would be a pretty fair assumption. Where do you think he was captured?”

“About 67.3km Northeast of Irkutsk,” the Vulcan replied.

Steve’s brow furrowed. “There’s a secret military installation in that area. If your Captain was down there, you have a problem on your hands. What was he doing down there, anyway?”

“We were working on an experiment, there was an error, and Captain Kirk was part of the recovery party sent down to retrieve the experiment.” Spock was determined to give Steve as much information as he could without telling him anything.

Now, if I were a Star Trek fan-fiction writer (which I am not), or even Mr Spock (which I am also not) I’d be taking this opportunity to make the most of Ensign Pavel Chekov. He is, after all, a Russian and, presumably, speaks a little of the local lingo. But, does he appear in this story? Ummm, no.

Update: Goodness, I almost forgot to mention - the Steve mentioned above is Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. So, we have a Star Trek / Six Million Dollar Man / Soviet Union crossover. At least, I assume it’s the Six Million Dollar Steve Austin, and not the guy from WWF - because that would be just too wierd.

Following on from the previous post about Cyrillic vs Latin, you might want to check out this fascinating article by Art Lebedev, tracing the history of the cyrillic typewriter.  I particularly like this gem of a paragraph about the development of the modern cyrillic keyboard:

But in the late 1980s foreign personal computers arrived in the USSR. Producing keyboards with account for the length of the Russian alphabet was and is uncommon. Therefore, some imbecile was told (or did he volunteer?—whatever) to Russianize a keyboard that was available. And this imbecile, apparently a programmer, did not do just a silly thing, but perpetrated a crime by putting comma in the upper case, his reasoning being the Russian alphabet is long, while the number of keys on the keyboard is only enough for the Latin alphabet.

[Hat tip: Blogchik]

I’ve only ever used this style of keyboard, and I find it incredibly difficult to type in Russian, so maybe I should be cursing this imbecilic engineer too.  But I shall refrain from doing so because I’m sure I’d be just as bad on any other design of cyrillic keyboard…

Maybe a keyboard like this (designed, incidentally, by Art Lebedev) would help…

Each key of the Optimus keyboard is a stand-alone display showing exactly what it is controlling at any particular moment. When you hit CapsLock, the display will show all uppercase letters, and you can easily toggle between languages and keyboard layouts. Add to that the capability of associating keys with certain controls for Photoshop or video games, and you’ve got one mighty powerful keyboard.

Via Laurence Jarvik I found this article by Sam Vaknin.  He wants Russia to abandon the cyrillic alphabet and switch to a latin one because, he argues, holding on to an archaic and over-complicated alphabet is holding back companies from investing in Russia:

According to the Russian headquarters of [Citibank], the price tag of opening the [Russian] branch reached "several million dollars". Most of it was to convert the bank’s global systems to the 33-letters Cyrillic alphabet. This is an illustration of the hidden business costs incurred by preferring the idiosyncratic Slavic script to the widely used Latin one.

Even NASA are having the odd problem…

NASA published last year the logbooks of the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The entries for Nov 25, 2000 and January read: "Sergei (Krikalev) discusses some problems with the way (Microsoft) Windows is handling Cyrillic fonts … Sergei is still having difficulties with his e-mail. After the mail sync, he still has ‘outgoing’ mail left instead of everything in the ’sent’ folder."

And I guess Vaknin makes a fair point in some ways - making money is important.  And the alphabet is intimidatingly different to some - how many times have first time travellers to Russia been advised that they must at least learn the cyrillic alphabet, otherwise they’ll never be able to make their way around the Moscow Metro?  I’m sure it puts off some travellers, those who want their holidays easy, simple, and unchallenging.  Considering whether Russia should switch to a latin alphabet is certainly a discussion worth having. 

But, to me, the Cyrillic alphabet is one of the greatest things about Russia.  Seriously, can you imagine Russia remaining the country it is, retaining it’s mysterious sense of identity, without its funny looking language?  I can’t. 

I certainly don’t want to advocate a policy that would keep investors away from Russia.  But, to be honest, I think there are actually plenty of good, practical, economically sound reasons for retaining cyrillic.  As Vaknin goes on to point out, Azerbaijan’s transition to the latin alphabet didn’t go exactly according to plan:

In August last year, the Azeri government suspended the publication of the weekly Impulse for refusing to switch from Soviet-era Cyrillic to Latin.

The periodical’s hapless owner protested that no one is able to decipher the newly introduced Latin script. Illiteracy has surged as a result and Russian citizens of Azerbaijan feel alienated and discriminated against. Recently Latinized former satellites of the Soviet Union seem to have been severed from the entire body of Russian culture, science and education.

Think of all the time people would have to spend learning what is to them an unfamiliar latin script.  Think of how newspaper and book sales would plummet in the short term, and how this would impact the public’s engagement in political and social discourse. (Actually, come to think of it, if this is the case then maybe changing to the latin alphabet would appeal to Putin’s authoritarian tendencies…).  Think of all the school textbooks that would have to be re-printed. 

The economic cost would be massive in the short term - and probably the long term - far outweighing the economic benefits of a few companies investing in Russia a little earlier than they otherwise would. 

And, let’s face it, Russia is a big market.  Big enough to persuade companies like Citibank to invest despite the extra cost.  To them, investing in Russia carries no extra problems than investing in Greece, Japan, or China would.  And, in today’s increasingly global world, companies should be getting pretty good at converting their computer systems to run in several different languages, several different alphabets.  If they haven’t figured out how to do it yet, they don’t deserve to thrive in today’s competitive business environment. 

Holly of mylittlerussia is spending the summer at the Middlebury College, learning Russian:

Вчера вечером я дала слово только говорить по-рускки до конца летней сессии!  Но, по-скольку не все говорят по-русски, я буду писать на русском и дать английский вариант.

Yesterday I took the language pledge to only speak russian until the end of the summer session.  However, seeing as most people don’t speak Russian, I’m going to write in Russian and give the English translation.

Good luck to Holly - I’m sure it’ll be an amazing benefit to her Russian.  I lived in Russia for a whole year, and never had the courage to limit myself to speaking just Russian.  In retrospect, I should have, because I became far too lazy, switched back to speaking English at the dorm each evening, and learnt far less that I otherwise would have.  Next time, next time…

Other Russian learners might want to check out mylittlerussia more often too, for the chance to see day to day text regularly translated between Russian and English. 

According to a Mercer survey on quality of life, Moscow ranks 170th in the world, below even Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. RIA Novosti report:

A city needs to be convenient if it wants to sell well. The two main complaints by foreign tourists about Moscow is that it is difficult to find your bearings because of a lack of street names and other signs in Latin letters, especially in the Metro, and a shortage of public toilets. One of the main problems, in the opinion of travel agents, is that Moscow and Russia are not advertised overseas, whereas Russians can see all sorts of adverts for foreign reports on the streets and the television. Besides, the traffic in the city is poorly organized, and there is a shortage of parking spaces in the city center, especially near the Kremlin. And, of course, there are too few hotels.

I couldn’t agree more with the complaint about the lack of latin leters on signs.  If you don’t speak the language it’s a real pain to get around - on my first visit to Moscow I invested a little time in learning the cyrillic alphabet, but I still had to spend ages puzzling each word out - and there really isn’t that much other than pride stopping the city authorities from writing street signs in both latin and cyrillic letters, at least around the city centre. 

Елизавета reports on a disturbing direction that her Pimsleur Russian lessons seem to be taking…

In the last Pimsleur lesson, I learned how to wine and dine my colleague’s spouse. In this lesson I have learned how to invite my colleague into MY HOTEL ROOM. Is it normal in Russia to invite your colleague to your hotel room? If so, I do not really want to go there.

My Russian teacher once decided that, for the day’s lesson, we would role play me trying to chat up a cute girl.  Unfortunately, this was in a one-on-one class, my teacher was almost sixty and had a sparkly set of gold teeth.  The role play did not go well.