By J.D. Reed

In 1887 Ludovic Zamenhof, multilingual Polish oculist, published a book indtroducing a ne language under the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto, meaning ’one who hopes.’ Zamenhof fervently wished that his invented tongue would become the world’s second language. Although that hope is still unrealized, nearly 6, 000 zealous Esperantists – the largest gathering ever – from as far away as Japan and Brazil are in Warsaw this week to honor Zamenhof on the occasion of the 100th birthday of his language. They are doing so with a variety of events, all in Esperanto, plus a visit to Zamenhof’s hometown of Bialystok.

Many people assume that Esperanto is a dying language, a verbal experiment that has simply not worked out. In fact, Esperantists can be found all around the world. Estimates of their total number vary widely, from 1 million to 8 million or more. Marjorie Duncan, 65, a retired Sydney, Australia, schoolteacher, believes the movement needs more young people. But, she says, they would ‘rather drive cars or go surfing.’

At a glance, Esperanto seems simple enough. It has only 16 easily memorized rules of grammar – no exceptions – and a basic vocabulary built from Indo-European roots. Experts claim that virtually anyone can learn Esperanto in 100 hours or less. But for some, numerous suffixes and prefixes may complicate matters. Accents always fall on the next-to-last syllable of a word. The no-frills system can handle many idiomatic phrases from other languages.

The use of Esperanto probably reached its peak in the 1920s, when idealists embraced it as one small step toward peace. Some intellectuals viewed it as aa solution to the language problem which they felt contributed to political misunderstanding; in some British schools youngsters could study Esperanto. But interest died down after World War II, partly because governments did not support the language, partly because English was fast becoming the lingua franca of business and travel. Esperantists have urged the United Nations to adopt their language, but the organization has its hands full with six official ones (English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian).

Humphrey Tonkin, president of the Rotterdam-based Universal Esperanto Association, says the Lingvo Internacia is popular in lands whose languages do not travel a lot. Examples: Iran, Brazil, the Netherlands and the Scandinavia countries.

A sizable concentration of Esperantists is found in Japan, where the language has sometimes been used for discussions by scientists who speak different languages. China uses Esperanto to facilitate communication between speakers of its northern and southern dialects and supports an active publishing program.

Many masterpieces of literature have been translated into Esperanto, including the

Koran and some of Shakespeare’s plays. But Mary Davies, an Esperantist who runs a hotel in Heysham, England, complains: ‘We don’t have any light reading.’

When they travel, many Esperantists wear lapel pins shaped like green stars that signal them as Esperanto speakers, in the hope of meeting fellow speakers. They also call up comrades-in-conversation and exchange cassette tapes by mail.

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Exercise 20. Translate the following text into the Russian language paying attention to the idiomatic expressions.

He Takes the Cake

That guy, Fred, is a read top banana. The guy is out to lunch. He better be careful because real soon he’s going to find himself eating humble pie. His ideas were OK on the surface but when you start to look at the you realize that they are really Swiss cheese. He always expects us to fill in the holes and make him look good. We get everything he gives us done to a T, but he takes all the credit. It would be nice if, for once, he would give us time to develop something challenging that we can really sink our teeth int o. At least it would be nice to get credit for all that we do make him and our organization look good, but I doubt that will happen, he always wants the whole enchilada for himself.

He is always dangling the carrot of private compliments in our faces, but we know they are insincere. He must think we are bunch of cream puffs. But someday, he is going to get his pie in the face. He’ll be in a real stew and we won’t be there to clean it up. Soon… he’ll get his just desserts because he can’t have the case andeat it too.

Exercise 21. Translate the following text into the Russian language.

A. I KNOW WHAT YOU THINK …..

By Jeans U. Sievertsen, professor of psychology

and management trainer in Hamburg,

“If looks could kill”, goes the old saying, or ”talk is silver, silence is gold”.

Vox populi – the voice of the people – is fond of such traditional sayings which frequently conceal remark ably fundamental truths. Both proverbs suggest that the spoken audible word is by no means the primary form of human communication. What is left unspoken frequently says more than even the most rhetorically sophisticated sentence.

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B How People Can Interact

It is highly interesting to look at two people interacting only on the level of their own interpretations. One example illustrates this particularly well: a trapper goes into a forest to fell a tree. He sees an Indian busily chopping wood in front of his wigwam. He thinks (and this is where his assumptions about reality commerce) that the Indian is particularly sensitive to natural events and interprets the latter’s

behavior as meaning that the coming winter is likely to be cold. Just to be on the safe side, he cuts two trees which he drags past the Indian on his way back.

The Indian now thinks to himself “normally, the trapper only drag one tree. Today he has two. This must mean that the winter is going to be very cold. This results in an awful lot of wood being cut.

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C Problems and Solutions

The way out of this dilemma is to create a feeling of trust and to talk about what we really think. To go back to the trapper: if he had asked the Indian the first place why he was chopping so much wood, he would probably have received an honest answer and could have saved himself the added work of felling two trees.

Отредактируйте перевод. Удалось ли переводчику передать правильно информацию?

Решение данного вопроса простое; попробуйте доверять друг другу и честно говорить о том, что вы думаете. Вернемся к охотнику: если бы он спросил индейца, почему он заготавливает так много дров, то получил бы более или менее честный ответ и сэкономил бы свои силы и время, верно?

D Translate the following paragraph into the English language.

An interesting proposal was once made at an international conference: problems should not be discussed until each side is able to describe the other’s stance to the first party’s satisfaction. This involves effort and requires trust, of course. But trust is something I must give before I get it back. The reward for this effort is clarity, which makes it easier to us to accept that various people behave, give and talk differently. In this way people can understand each other more clearly and are therefore more satisfied with each other.

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Exercise 22. Translate the following text from ‘ The Economist’ into the Russian

language.

How long will Google’s magic last?

“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one, ” wrote Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the search firm’s founders, in a letter to investors ahead of its stockmarket flotation in 2004. Since then, Google has burnished its reputation as one of the quickest companies on the planet. This year alone it has raised eyebrows by taking a stake in a wind-energy project off the east coast of America and by testing self-driving cars, which have already covered over 140, 000 miles (225, 000km) on the countries roads.

Google has been able to afford such flights of fancy thanks to its amazingly successful online-search business. This has produced handsome returns for the firm’s investors, who have seen the company transform itself in the space of a mere 12 years from a tiny start-up into a behemoth with a $180 billion market capitalization that sprawls across a vast headquarters in Silicon Valley known as the Googleplex. Google also stretches across the web like a giant spider, with a leg in everything from online search and e-mail to social networking and web-based software applications, or apps.

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Much of its growth has been organic, but Google has also splashed out on some sizeable acquisitions. In 2006 it paid $1.7 billion for YouTube, a website that lets people post videos of their children, kittens and Lady Gaga impersonations. The following year it snapped up DoubleClick, an online-advertising network, for $3.1 billion. More deals are likely: Google is bidding for Croupon, a trendy e-commerce business, using some of the $billion sitting in its coffers.

All this has turned Doodle into a force to be reckoned with.

But now the champion of the unorthodox is faced with two conventional business challenges. The first involves placating regulators who feel that it may be abusing its considerable power. The European Union announced a formal investigation into claims that Google has been manipulating search results to give an unfair advantage to its own services – a charge the firm vigorously denies. In America, Google faces a similar investigation in Texas and is also battling with a bunch of online travel companies who have been lobbying the government to veto its recent purchase of its ITA Software, a company that provides data about flights.

The other challenge facing Google is now to find new sources of growth. In spite of all the experiments it has launched, the firm is still heavily dependent on search-related advertising. Last year this accounted for almost all of its $24 billon of revenue and 56.5 billion of profit. Acquisitions such as YouTube have deepened rather than reduced the firm’s dependence on advertising. Steve Ballmer, the boss of Google’s arch-rival Microsoft, has derided the search company for being “a one-trick pony”.

Ironically, investors’ biggest worry is that Google will end up like Microsoft, which has failed to find big new sources of revenue and profit to replace those from its two ageing ponies, the Windows operating system and the Office suite of business software.

(from ‘The Economist’, December 4^th, 2010)

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