Translation query

[William Ryan]

Hold the press!
My comments, like the suggestions of US 'theAYter', have been concerned 
with variant pronunciations of 'theatre' in English, not with lexical 
alternatives. As I understand it, the Russian non-standard 'keatr' or 
'keiatr' is a lexical not a phonetic alternative, whereas to write 
'featr' in English could only be facetious, or an attempt at the 
verbatim recording of uneducated speech.  th>f is normal in  uneducated 
London English but t>k is not, as far as I can remember, a common 
development in Russian.
Perhaps you need to think a bit more about register and date of usage. 
Vasmer (s.v. teatr) labels the word as narodnoe and cites Radishchev. 
After a quick dip into Yandex I note that the word is used by peasants 
in Turgenev, and by Osip in Lermontov's _Revizor_ and is clearly 
intended there as low servant language, but it is also used in the 1977 
Russian translation of Congreve's _Way of the World_ (first performed 
1700) to translate 'plays' in a dialogue where Sir Wilfull Witwoud, a 
drunken country gentleman with pretensions, is talking to the heiress 
Mrs Millamant (nor Millament as in the Russian, which manages to miss 
the point of the name):

    MILLAMENT I nauseate walking: 'tis a country diversion; I loathe the
    country and everything that relates to it.

    *SIR* WILFULL Indeed! Hah! Look ye, look ye, you do? Nay, 'tis like
    you may. Here are choice of pastimes here in town, as plays and the
    like, that must be confessed indeed -

This is translated as:

    Милламент. Терпеть не могу  прогулки.  Деревенские  забавы!  Не  выношу
    деревню и все, что с ней связано.
         Сэр Уилфул. Вот как?! Вот  как?!  Поди  ж  ты!  Похоже,  оно  точно.  В
    городе-то развлечений поболее,  кеатров  там  и  разного  прочего,  этого  не
    отнять.

Here the translator uses the word presumably to indicate provincial 
ignorance (although there is nothing special in the word 'plays' which 
requires such a translation) but nevertheless thinks it an appropriate 
word to put into the mouth of a late seventeenth-century member of the 
English landed gentry, albeit an ignorant one.
Not easy. That is why I gave up doing translations a long time ago.

Will Ryan




trubikhina at AOL.COM wrote:
>   Thank you all! The publisher is British so I will go with "featre" or “theetter.”
>  
>  Julia
>     -------------------
>  Julia Trubikhina
>  
>  Assistant Professor of Russian
>  Russian Program Coordinator
>  Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
>  Montclair State University
>  Dickson Hall, Room 138
>  Montclair, NJ 07043
>     
>  -----Original Message-----
>  From: paulbg at PBG-TRANSLATIONS.COM
>  To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
>  Sent: Sun, 22 Apr 2007 9:49 AM
>  Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Translation query
>  
>   William Ryan wrote: 
>  
>  > ... 
>  > In London, England, uneducated English for 'theatre' would be 'featre', > in which the last syllable is usually a glottal stop. ... 
>  
>  Could you clarify this, please? 
>  
>  A glo'al stop alone is pure silence, so it cannot be a syllable. Do you mean that the syllable /ends/ with a glo'al stop? Or /begins/ with one? 
>  
>  -- War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left. 
>  -- 
>  Paul B. Gallagher 
>  pbg translations, inc. 
>  "Russian Translations That Read Like Originals" 
>  http://pbg-translations.com 
>  
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-- 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Emeritus Professor W. F. Ryan FBA, FSA
Warburg Institute
(School of Advanced Study, University of London)
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