To: atm{at}shore.net, rflrs{at}rcn.com, tkrajci{at}san.osd.mil
From: tkrajci{at}san.osd.mil
Reply-To: tkrajci{at}san.osd.mil


>From: "Richard F.L.R. Snashall" 

>But how did you come up from "uniform" come to "singularly"?

The word in question is (transliterated into latin alphabet): "edinyj"

My electronic dictionary provides the following definition:

1) united, unified; common; indivisible 2) one, single, sole

It appears the computerized translation used the first definition.  I used
the second, and stuck on an adverbial ending to make the word
"singularly".

Sometimes I look up words and they have up to ten different meanings.  It
can be difficult to choose a decent translation in that case...gotta search
the surrounding context.

Some words, especially technical ones, are not in the dictionaries I have,
and I gotta walk down the hall and ask native Russian speakers what the
word means.

Sometimes the word is in the dictionary, but none of the definitions
provided appear to fit.  Again...walk down the hall and confer with several
native Russian speakers.

I wish it were easier, but it ain't.  (Note the use of both subjunctive
mood and slang/bad grammar in the last sentence.  This can give problems to
non-native English speakers.  ;-)

Word-by-word translation simply does not work.  As an example consider the
English phrase "heart attack."  Last week I tried to say this in
Russian to a friend...literally translating from English.  I was wrong. 
They use a different word for "attack"...not
"attaka"...but "pristup", which has a first meaning of
assault or onslaught, and the second meaning of "attack."  (And
if that is not bad enough...the verb form of "pristup" is
"pristupat'"...which does *not* mean "to attack".  It
means "to set about, to start, to begin".  Oh, my aching head. 
And there are countless other examples.  Word-by-word translation does not
work...but that's how translation software usually works in the present
version.

By the way, the word “Š„¢ëŠ‡…”ŠŠ (in Cyrillic, at least in my email reader)
transliterates to "figurizatsiya"...which I translate as
"figuring".  Obviously many of our email systems in the
non-Russian world do not handle Cyrillic very well.  I'll transliterate
into latin alphabet from now on in this forum.

Tom Krajci
Tashkent, Uzbekistan

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