Russian Translation: Theory and Practice (Thinking Translation) Review

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Russian Translation: Theory and Practice (Thinking Translation) ReviewIt is with some reluctance that I invest my time writing this review, knowing full well that few people will ever read my comments; after all, how many people run out and purchase a book on Russian to English translation theory? And the few buyers who do actually end up clicking on my review will no doubt be immediate dissuaded by its obvious verbosity.
I purchased this book in connection with my graduate education in Central and Eastern European Studies. As I neared the end of my graduate program, I was looking for a thesis project that might carry relevance in the eyes of potential employers. As I searched job announcements for media and intelligence analyst positions in the government sector, nearly every firm stated that qualified candidates needed to have had experience translating. Although I had lived and traveled in Russia extensively and had spent months of my life speaking nothing but Russian, had an undergraduate degree in Russian language, and had read Russian classics in the original, oddly enough, I had never tried my hand at translating. I got approval from the department to put together what turned out to be a 100 page Russian to English translation project in lieu of a conventional capstone thesis project. That project was based almost strictly on Andrews' and Maximova's new text book.
I can basically thank my lucky stars that Andrews and Maksimova had published this book in early 2010, only a few months prior to my first query on Amazon for a book on "Russian to English translation theory." Were it not for these two Duke Professors writing their book, I might have been forced to write my thesis on the "Ripening of Meat: Theory and Practice of the Process (Translation of the Russian book: Sozrevania myasa: tioria I practika potsess)" which was the next nearest match that came up in my search! So, if nothing else, the book is worth a good three stars or so based alone on the paucity of any real competition.
Before I tell you why I added another star to give it four, but didn't give it five, let me first qualify my statements by objectively describing my own Russian language abilities. I feel this is necessary because my comments on the ease or difficulty of the translation exercises provided in this book would otherwise be largely arcane to the reader of my review who may possess a higher or lower technical ability in Russian than I do.
Page xii of the text book's introduction states that "This course in translation is developed for students who have completed the equivalent of two years of college Russian. In proficiency terms, these materials are appropriate for students with a minimum rating of ACTFL Intermediate Mid, TRKI Level1, ILR 2 and can also be used productively at more advanced levels." As for me, I passed an oral proficiency interview in 2006 on the ILR scale at a level 3+ and in 2009 at a level 3, and then finally, in March 2010, I submitted myself to an oral proficiency interview with ACTFL and scored a "superior."
In other words, I easily met the minimum rating suggested by the authors and am ashamed to admit that I thought that I would breeze through the exercises in this book because of it. My experience turned out to be quite the opposite. The translation exercises in this book are no walk in the park. They require a strong knowledge of Russian and even then some of the exercises will make your mind spin. I give the authors an A+ for finding difficult translations that stretch the student to the limit.
If you are like me and are using the book in self-study fashion without the assistance of a qualified professor then you will need to find a native Russian tutor who has a reasonable knowledge of English and can offer you objective feedback on your finished translations.
I feel strongly that the authors of this book need to improve the online tutor guide that accompanies the book. It would have been nice for an amateur translator such as me to have been able to compare every one of my translations against the authors' best target text. Instead, I was only able to compare a few of my translations to the scanty few target texts that they provided in the tutoring guide and since I lacked the good fortune of having a tenured professor with an expert command of Russian to English translation experience, my project suffered a bit from lack of objective oversight. That being said, I can only express a great deal of thanks to a fellow graduate student and native Russian who read and reviewed every one of my tedious translations and provided invaluable insights (especially on the chapter about figurative meaning!).
On an entirely different note, the narratives at the beginning of each chapter that introduce different issues in the translation process are at times highly educational and I took away several gems. For instance, I never realized the degree to which irony and sarcasm pervade Russian newspaper articles. The authors were quick to point this out, warning the student to look for such instances of sarcasm and make sure that they be portrayed accurately in the target text.
On the other hand, I often found the narratives to be written in such a vexingly academic fashion that it seemed at times as if Andrews' and Maksimova's lost sight of the fact that they were writing a text book for amateur translators and not their fellow Russian Ph.d cronies who had also written 300 page dissertations on language morphology and phonology. Even with a dictionary in hand, much of what they were trying to teach seemed inaccessible to my feeble mind based on their highbrow linguistic vocabulary (I know how ridiculous that must sound seeing that this is a book about mastering the art of translation and therefore presupposes the pupils' interest in assimilating the very dictionary itself into the brain cells, but perhaps you'll agree with me if you buy the text and read it for yourself).
In any event, I still liked the book and am forever indebted to these two professors for putting together a text on a subject that had otherwise been entirely neglected. I am glad I finally tried my hand at translating and can say unequivocally that my appreciation for the complexity of the Russian language has only improved. It is one thing to read a passage or two in a classic Russian novel and understand, or claim to understand, what you are reading. It is an entirely different and more difficult thing to take that very passage and translate it into a respectable target text in English.
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