We humans, including the linguists among us, are given to thinking of terminologies in somewhat the same way we think of accents. That is to say, we note the presence of an accent when it differs from our own, rarely pondering the fact that, depending on the situation, absolutely everyone has an accent, because everyone’s speech differs from someone else’s. Even the announcers on National Public Radio, whose English epitomizes the phrase, “received pronunciation,” have accents when addressing an audience of New Zealanders, Jamaicans or Alabamans. Analogously, what we think as terminology involves clusters of words from unfamiliar fields, while the terms from fields we know thoroughly and use frequently are simply words to us. In the Russian interpreting market, terminologies may be divided into several categories. There are those, such as diplomacy and banking, that are in such high demand that anyone who has been doing this work for a while uses them frequently and barely thinks of them any more as separate terminology sets. Because we work with them so often, we think of them as mere words, although the terms and their equivalents in the other language are clearly established and linked, with little room for alternative renderings. Then there are those fields whose terminologies are still emerging in Russian—entrepreneurship, social work, the non-profit sector—and here, the interpreter who is in the right place at the right time and has a grasp of the concepts is a participant, willy-nilly, in something historic: the creation of new terminology—call it terminological midwifery. There is a third category of terminology, in which terms and their equivalents in the other language are as clearly established as they are in the first category, but knowledge of them is in less demand. This third category of terminology is the most difficult for an interpreter; due to lack of previous exposure, she may not be familiar with the terms when she accepts the assignment, but still she must get them right. There is in the interpreting industry—what shall I call it? an expectation? a hope? a chimerical fantasy?—that the client will provide materials in advance, agendas, presentations, even glossaries, to help the interpreter prepare, or, if that is out of the question, as it often inscrutably is, one hopes that the client will at least describe what the assignment is about, so that the interpreter can consult her sources and work up her own prep materials. Maybe there is a place somewhere, over the rainbow, where interpreters are, on a regular basis, accurately informed about the nature of assignments. Perhaps this happens in certain small, inoffensive countries, where many people are multilingual and where, because of their insignificance in the international order, people are forced to take note of the existence of the rest of the world. In my fantasies about these countries, even monolingual people are more sophisticated about language than they are in the empires and former empires we Russian-English practitioners generally deal with, and so, in such places, interpreters are usually told ahead of time the things they need to know. Yes, it’s true: sometimes clients do not accurately inform interpreters, even in broad terms, as to what a meeting is about, as an experience from my own recent practice shows. The subject was trains—locomotives, to be precise. Before I arrived, I was provided—Fedex!—with a weighty report on the restructuring of the national railway system in one of the Central Asian countries, a report filled with relatively familiar economics terms and concepts, many of them (ah, yes!) cognates, and not even false ones. I studied the report with due diligence, and mastered it, terms, concepts, cognates and finally, the entire report. But while the cognates in it were not false, the report itself turned out to be falsely representative of the nature of the assignment; it was nearly worthless for the purposes of my work, although some consultant had doubtless been paid lots of dollars—tax dollars, probably—to produce it. The client, an engineering and economics consulting company in our nation’s capital, was unable to tell me much about the nature of its own project, apart from what was in the above-mentioned report. How can an organization know so little about what it is doing? And pay so much to know so little? We’re not talking about right hands and left hands here; we’re talking about the very department that organized the meetings. After my arrival on the job, one of the Central Asian locomotive-drivers asked whether I had graduated from a “железнодорожный институт” [college for railroad workers]. Should I inform him that, as far as I knew, there was no such thing in this country? What’s an interpreter to say in response to such a question, when what she has is a degree in Russian language and literature from a university respected in America but probably unknown in Central Asia, plus interpreting experience so diverse that it borders on the indescribable? What is she to say when before her stands the manager of a locomotive depot who probably served his apprenticeship while Stalin was alive and people believed that socialism equaled something-or-other plus electrification? “I have thirteen years of experience as an interpreter in numerous technical fields,” I told him, swallowing hard and enumerating those technical fields, a list suddenly notable for the absence of locomotives anywhere on it. “I am a professional interpreter. One of my qualifications is that I pick up new terms very quickly.” He turned to his colleague and spoke to him in a language I didn’t recognize, a Turkic one, I assume, and then they both glanced at me and laughed. I met their look squarely. And as I gazed at them I thought that a much-vaunted aspect of translation and interpretation—learning about many different fields—has a flip side. That flip side is dealing with the ignorant client who scorns you because you do not already know everything about his field. That same client is usually not aware that translation and interpretation are professions in and of themselves. “Well,” said the man (I would learn that he was a depot manager, and I would learn what that meant), “if you don’t understand something, we will interpret for you!” More laughter, followed by more Turkic. Some might say I should not have accepted this assignment, since I did not know the terminology. Do such people work for a living, I wonder? And in fact, having received the restructuring report, I believed I had been told what the subject was, and I had studied the report in good faith. Only, as happens so often in life, things did not turn out as planned. Why did the consulting firm know the subject was locomotives when I arrived to begin the assignment, but not when we talked on the phone a day or two earlier? And then, as quickly as Alice going down the rabbit-hole, I found myself on factory shop floors in a different state every day of the week, from Pennsylvania to Idaho, and everywhere friendly hands reached out to offer me standard-issue bright yellow safety helmets and goggles. (At some factories, the goggles were not collected as we left, so, in addition to the job’s other bonuses, I found four pairs at the bottom of my voluminous shoulder bag when the assignment was over.) I climbed up and down partially constructed locomotives, struggling to make myself heard over the screech of machine tools and the roar of welding torches and men in greasy coveralls bellowing good-naturedly at each other down the assembly line. At the same time, I attempted to interpret sentences containing words like humpyard, adhesion, flywheel, rectifier, torque converter, cooling hood, load box, boring [the process, not the adjective], throttle [the noun, not the verb] and many more. The learning curve was steep indeed, but with people on opposite sides of the language barrier who had a common understanding of their subject matter, and with the factory floor and everything on it serving as one enormous visual aid, I compiled, in less than a day and a half, a glossary that served magnificently for the remaining ten days. Toward the middle of the assignment, the glossary and the invisible support it provided led an American who had joined the meeting a few days late to ask if I had studied engineering. It was virtually the same question I’d been asked at the beginning, but put this time in a completely different tone. And I gave precisely the same answer as I had given before: no, I said, I was not trained in the field, but I had lots of diverse terminological experience as an interpreter, and I could learn terms quickly, and this time my answer, too, had a completely different tone. Below is the glossary in question, presented so that the next Russian-English interpreter who takes on locomotives will have more to start with than I did (granted, of course, that that lucky person reads SlavFile). Many of these words you may have seen elsewhere, but their presence here means that these are the words the guys in the greasy coveralls actually bawl across the shop floor at each other. I was there; I heard them; I verified and immediately noted what I was told. No pre-job preparation using the Internet and dictionaries or trade journals could be so real, so down-and-dirty, so nitty-gritty as what you now hold in your hands. It’s a wonder these pages are not covered in diesel fuel and motor oil. Any mistakes in the list below are simply further testament to its authenticity; you can write them off to the deafening racket of machinery that caused me to mishear a word, or to the vibrating equipment that from time to time bumped against my writing arm, causing my pen to slip.“За любовь, за дружбу, за локомотивную службу.”
—a toast popular with locomotive-drivers in the Russian-speaking world
| AC | асинхронный ток/переменный ток |
| adhesion | касательная сила/коэффициент цепления |
| air cushion | воздушная подушка |
| availability [of a train] | выход [поезда] на линию |
| axis | ось |
| bearing | подшипник |
| bogey/truck | тележка |
| bore | диаметр цилиндра |
| boring | сверление |
| cab | кабина |
| caboose | хвостовой вагон |
| camshaft | газораспределительный вал |
| carburetor | смеситель |
| coal mine [open pit] | угольный разрез |
| coil | обмотка |
| commutator | коллектор |
| converter | преобразователь |
| cooling hood | шахта холодильника |
| core engine | блок цилиндров |
| coupler | автоцепка |
| coupling | соединение |
| crankshaft | коленчатый вал |
| DC | постоянный ток |
| derailment | сход с рельса |
| diesel locomotive | тепловоз |
| dip and bake | пропитка |
| displacement | обьем |
| efficiency | коэффициент полезного действия /КПЗ |
| emissions | выбросы |
| equipment blower | вентилятор охлаждения тяговых систем |
| excitement | возбуждение |
| exhaust valve | выпускной клапан |
| fin | лист |
| flagman | сигналист |
| flange | фланец/гребень |
| flywheel | маховик |
| fouling | отложение масел |
| four-stroke [two-stroke] | четырехтактный [двухтактный] |
| fuel consumption | расход топлива |
| gas turbine | газотурбина |
| haul | тянуть |
| heat exchanger | теплообменник |
| high-voltage chamber | высоковольтная камера |
| horsepower | лощадиная сила |
| humpyard | горка |
| injector | форсунка |
| intake valve | впускной клапан |
| liner | гильза |
| LNG | жидкостный природный газ |
| load box | реостатный исправитель |
| load factor | характеристика нагрузки |
| locomotive fleet | локомотивный парк |
| mainline locomotive | магистральный локомотив |
| oil gauge/dipstick | щуп |
| oilpan | поддон/масленый резервуар |
| operator | машинист |
| oven | сушка |
| overhaul | детальный ремонт |
| piston | поршень |
| power assembly [cylinder package] | поршневая группа |
| primer [as in paint] | грунтовка |
| railroad tie | шпала |
| rectifier | выпрямитель |
| remanufacturing | восстановление |
| repowering | модернизация |
| retention tank | отстойнник |
| rod | шатун |
| roundhouse | паровозное депо |
| rubber biscuit | резиновая подушка |
| shaft-driven | валоприводной |
| sheet metal | листовка/обшивка |
| sheet metal worker | металлист |
| shot [used for paint removal] | стальной порошок |
| shunter/switcher | маневревый локомотив |
| slippage | буксование |
| sparkplug | свеча |
| start | запуск |
| stoker | кочегар |
| suspension | подвеска |
| stroke | ход поршня |
| test cell | испытательный стенд |
| throttle | дроссель |
| toe cap [protective gear] | набалдашник |
| torque | момент затяжки |
| torque converter | гидромеханическая передача |
| train master | начальник депо |
| turbocharger | турбокомпрессор |
| turn over | перекантовать/кантовка |
| traction generator | тяговой генератор |
| traction motor | тяговой мотор |
| traction | тяговая сила |
| wiring [process] | монтаж проводов |
Laura Wolfson [was] the assistant editor of SlavFile [in the late nineties and early aughts]. She can be reached at lauraestherwolfson@gmail.com. Feel free to contact her if you need a free pair of industrial safety goggles. If any other interpreter or translator has compiled analogous lists, we invite you to submit them to the SlavFile, with or without introductions.