Late Nite Oddity: Maybe Not Russian Spam After All
We are getting a lot of Russian comment spam lately, so for the heck of it I copied this recent item into one of thos online translation thingys:
Мало кто может похвастаться такой смекалкой, как у автора.
Which turns out to mean:
Very few people can brag of such sharpness, as at the author.
Maybe we have some Rusky DL fans?
Maybe they’re trying to track DV down from his sub days.
Praise from Communists would surprise you?
Now Miscreant, that was damn funny. I actually laughed out loud.
Of course, not all Russians are communists anymore, and vice versa. Indeed, they have embraced the thuggish style of capitalism. But anyway…
Is there sarcasm in the Russian language?
Did the comment include a link? If so, it likely was spam, of the kind we sometimes see in English: “I totally agree. Keep up the good work.” In which one of these words is a link to http://www.sellyouprescriptions.com or some shit like that.
I’ve seen a few of those in Chinese lately.
Of course, parody and sarcasm usually need a snark tag in translation.
“I totally agree. Keep up the good work.”
I take these at face value.
Ya govaryu nemnovo po-ruskii. Ya izuchal russki yazik v Universichetckie Kentucke v 1975-6 godae.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a Cyrillic keyboard, so that’s the transliterated version. When I have tried to copy and paste some Cyrillic characters on my site, it worked when I was using WordPress 1.5.2, but when I upgraded to 2.5.1, it ceased working.
By the way, nemnovo po-ruskii means a little Russian! I was a lot better when I was graduated, but haven’t had anyone with whom to converse in Russian in decades, so I’m losing the language.
By the way, как у автора is more likely to mean “who is the author.” Quite frankly, I’d have to dig out an old Russian dictionary to translate the whole thing.
One of the things about Russian is that direct translations yield an idiom that is very strange to English speakers. For example kak vyi zavut is the question, “what is your name,” but directly translates as “what are you called.”