The Russian Word’s Worth

"I’ve been reading Michele Berdy’s columns in The Moscow Times about little translation problems and this book is a compilation of these columns. They’re very entertaining. People who don’t know Russian at all can read them with real interest and enjoyment. She’s someone who wonders if she’s the American who has lived longest in Moscow. She’s been there for 32 years and has done all kinds of different work. She really has encountered all the day-to-day cultural misunderstandings between Westerners and Russians trying to do things together. These columns are the distillation of all that. One of the columns I particularly love is when she talks about all the tiny little Russian exclamations, all the two and three letter words and the ones that are really just sounds – ‘akh’, ‘ekh’, ‘ookh’. She writes about them really funnily. Yes. As a translator myself these are the words that always send me into a panic: I think ‘to’ more than anything. It has so many different meanings and you don’t notice the little words as much as the long words that you don’t understand. I have made a vow to always check with a Russian when I encounter ‘to’. There’s an amazing little story of doing something, interpreting, at a meeting with Yeltsin when he was nobody particularly important in 1988 and Yeltsin brought her a chair and a cup of coffee, quite uninvited and unnoticed. She said no client had ever been so considerate. She just has a wealth of practical experience of the language."