The Translator's Tools

To be able to produce a faithful translation, the translator must have a thorough understanding of the meaning of words and phrases in the source text, be it in his/her native language or otherwise. In many cases this requires use of dictionaries. It should be borne in mind that bilingual (translated) dictionaries sometimes are misleading, and overconfidence in one's grasp of one's native language may also lead to a faulty translation.

If a Russian/Ukrainian word or phrase is not to be found in a bilingual dictionary, say in Russian/Ukrainian-English dictionary (see the list of "must have" dic­tionaries following these notes), it should next be looked up in all the other available Russian/Ukrainian-English dictionaries, even if they are smaller in volume. The problem may lie in the fact that the word or phrase is a specialist term. In that case, it has to be looked up in an encyclopedic dictionary that are mentioned in the list below) in order to ascertain which specialized area of knowledge the lexical item in question belongs to and what it means. Once the meaning of the word or phrase and the specialized area of knowledge they belong to have been established, the word or phrase meaning in question has to be looked up in the relevant bilingual specialized dictionaries, be it a Russian/Ukrainian-English dictionary of marine terms, entomology or other field of knowledge.

It may well be that the elusive phrase is an idiom, i.e. a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the mean ings of its individual words, e.g. over the moon, etc. In this case the Lubenskaya and/or Kveselevitch Russian-English phraseological dictionaries should be able to stand in good stead. If the phrase is not there, it would have to be looked up in the Russian-Russian phraseological dictionary Фразеологический словарь (под редакцией А.И.Молоткова, 1967). When the meaning of the phrase becomes transparent, an appropriate English approximation will be relatively easy to find.

Especially when translating from English into Russian/Ukrainian, the reference sources of last resort may have to be The Encyclopedia Britannica and The Encyclopedia Americana.

It often happens that the translator becomes the first person to put into circulation a translation of a word or phrase which subsequently, for better or worse, gains wide currency.

The minimum "must have" set of dictionaries for the translator working in English and Russian is as follows.

Dictionaries and Thesauruses:

1. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary /http://www.m-w.com/

2. Oxford English Dictionary /http://www.oed.com/

3. American Heritage Dictionary /www.bartleby.com/reference/

4.WordWeb /www.netword.demon.co.uk/wweb/

5.Wordsmyth /http://www.wordsmyth.net/

6. Roget's Thesaurus /http://search.thesaurus.com/

7.Словарь Даля http://translate.spb.ru/cgi-bin/index.cgi?dict=24

8.Українсько-англійський словник: Близько 60000 слів / Уклад.П. Подвезько. — Київ: Рад. школа, 1952. — 1012 c.

9.Англо-український словник: Близько 65000 слів / Уклад. М. П. Подвезько, М. І. Балла; за редакцією Ю. О. Жлуктенка. — Київ: Рад. школа, 1974. — 663 с.

10.Англо-український словник — English-Ukrainian Dictionary. Близько 120000 слів: у 2-х томах / Уклад. М. І. Балла. — Київ: Освіта, 1996. — 1464 с.

11.Англо-український фразеологічний словник: близько 30 000 фразеологічних виразів / Уклад. К. Т. Баранцев. — Київ: Знання, 2005. — 1056 с. — ISBN 966—620-231-Х

12.Англо-український словник: більше 100 000 слів (350 000 варіантів перекладу) /за ред. проф. Гороть Є.І. – Вінниця: Нова Книга, 2006. – 1700 с.

13.Українсько-англійський словник: близько 200 000 слів /за ред. проф. Гороть Є.І. – Вінниця: Нова Книга, 2009. – 1040 с.

4