KZBlog

Dec 4th was:

1) The Presidential Elections in Kazakhstan–The incumbent won with 91%.

2) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince came out in Russian (ie came to Kazakhstan for the first time)

Fun with linguistics: I remember everything from the English version well enough to understand what is going on or I would be doomed. Also fortuantely, she uses fairly standard characterizations–when people get mad they turn red and fume, when people fall asleep studying their mouths hang open and their hair gets messed up. There’s a certain amount of predictability to the words.

• I suspect at the end of this, I will remember forever how to say “wizard” and “witch” in Russian, not to mention “magic wand.” This will be very useful vocabulary.
• There are a million words for “said.” Not only words like “whispered”, “shouted”, “commanded”, or “began to speak”, “continued”, but also words that are all defined in the dictionary as “said”, “uttered.” I cannot for the life of me figure out when each is supposed to be used.
• One of the complaints some Russian-speakers have noted is that the translator transliterates Rowling’s coinages instead of translating them into some Russian equivalent–so Hogwarts is just transliterated Xogvarts, etc.. But: Snape for some reason was changed to Snegg. and Hedwig is Bulka (which I think means ‘roll’). Words that have clear meanings are translated so Wormtail is “Xvost'” or “Tail”. It’s a little off-putting and I wish they would either translate or transliterate instead of doing both.
• The word for torture when used with a self-reflexive ending means “to try.” It’s getting confusing:
  “The Crufixatius (sp?) Curse is a horrible form of try.”
  “Torture to do better next time, please.”
  My wife noted that trying is like torturing yourself and I think this says a lot about the Slavic character.