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Word filtered down through the campaign grapevine yesterday, about a soccer match to be held between the French and the Russians at 6:30 pm. I wondered, briefly, if this was going to be the same kind of affair as took place a few campaigns ago, where the Russian side was represented by an actual team (like, with uniforms, that played together on a regular basis) that was brought in from town. On the way over to the game, I ran into a local resident that was moseying along the road:
The game had been going on for some time by the time I arrived, and it turned out to be a pickup game, five men to a side, with the French team sporting campaign tee shirts as a sort of uniform. The Russian players on the field could be identified as the ones without the distinctive sky blue tees. The field itself was a mostly flat area behind one of the abandoned buildings in the hotel area, the surface of which was covered largely by dirt and dying clumps of grass, with some scattered small shards of concrete, broken glass, and who knows what else.
The game was played with spirit, and the final score was 4-2, if memory serves, in favor of the French.
One thing I try to take advantage of here in Baikonur is the ability to ask questions of subject-matter experts so as to gain insight into terminology useful for translation. This is an outgrowth of my experience as a so-called “knowledge engineer” back during the second Great Artificial Intelligence Infatuation of the late 1980s, when guys like me would sit down with technical experts and questions them, with the idea of then embedding their hard-won knowledge in software systems capable of dealing with problems at the same level as a human expert.
Most expert systems ended up going nowhere, for various reasons. The ones that were successful were generally kept under wraps. I moved on from knowledge engineering, to software marketing, and eventually found my “center” as a multilingual wordsmith.
Getting answers is not as straightforward as you might think. Some experts figure you’re not really capable of understanding the technical end of the business, and thus, they don’t really try to explain the difference between X and Y. A variation on this theme is the expert who says “it’s the same thing.”
Then there are experts who are perfectly capable of performing in their area of expertise, but cannot explain their way out of a wet paper bag. Their explanations tend to be overly detailed and incomplete.
There are experts who are highly competent, but whose knowledge of terminology is embarrassingly thin. I once had a Russian safety expert – a highly regarded veteran with many years of experience – insist that the official designation of the Progress cargo vehicle was different from what one could find on any number of design documents, specifications, flight rules, etc.
Today’s exercise in asking questions taught me a valuable lesson that can be summarized as follows: not all activities are tests. Therefore, while one might indeed perform a leak check while bringing a pressurization system to a certain pressure, the purpose of the exercise is to establish the pressure, not perform the test.
In other news, I had picked up a camel-hair cap at the market this past Sunday specifically intended to cover one’s head in a sauna, and I put it to use today. I feel a little ridiculous wearing it, but Pavel – one of the other regulars at the twice-a-week torture session – says it helps keeps your head cool. Frankly, I didn’t really notice a difference, but at least nobody laughed.
Dinner was accompanied by a nice white “Chateaux de St. Jean” from Sonoma, which was favorably commented on by one of our French colleagues. In related news, I am happy to note that while I have not lost any weight while at Baikonur, neither have I gained any, which is very good news, considering the availability of high-calorie goodies in the dining room.
Spacecraft propellant loading commences Saturday. In anticipation of a stressful several days of 120% concentration, the prop team has a visit scheduled tomorrow to the Gagarin Museum. I am the designated interpreter.
So I better get some sleep.
If there are two things the French team likes to do outside of working hours, it’s going into Baikonur on Saturday night to party until the wee hours and to go into town at any time to see something new. (I must admit to a weakness for the latter, myself.) Yesterday, events conspired to combine the two into a “perfect storm” of sleep deprivation for the French team.
The town trip departure was moved up by an hour, to 9 am, to enable folks to see whatever it was that was planned to commemorate Victory Day1 in the main square in Baikonur. There was a sepulchral silence on the bus going into town, as pretty much all of the French team was sound asleep, having returned from town at around 5 am.
After our group disembarked from the bus behind the Palermo Pizzeria and began walking down the main street (named “Arbat” because it, like its famous namesake in Moscow, is a pedestrian mall) an amplified voice from the direction of the square stopped speaking and a recorded song began playing through the sound system. We got to the square just as formations of cadets and Ministry of Emergencies troops were being dismissed.
Like just about any soldiers on parade in their home town, the formations broke up into family groups that would pose with their loved ones in uniform.
More common were small groups of three, consisting of a uniformed serviceman, a wife, and a small child or infant. As I looked around, images from my past came to mind, and they weren’t substantially different from what was unfolding in front of my eyes, and I felt my eyes getting wet.
There were more people out and about in Baikonur than I have ever seen at one time. Many people wore victory ribbons with a simple design of alternating orange and black stripes running lengthwise along the ribbon’s fabric. I saw one wrinkled old woman in the crowd wearing three ancient-looking medals, and wondered if she was one of the 18 surviving veterans of the Great Patriotic War who live today in Baikonur. She was swallowed by the crowd before I could ask.
Away from the square, there was a more festive holiday feeling in the air. Vendors sold a variety of goods of every kind, although unlike such public celebrations in the United States, there were no stands hawking food items.
There are, instead, a number of restaurants along the Arbat, from the Akhtamar Armenian restaurant near the town square, to the Palermo Pizzeria at the other end of the pedestrian mall. As I walked toward the Palermo, I was tempted by the aroma of grilling shashlyk – skewers of various kinds of meat and fish typically served with thin-sliced marinated onions – but it was too early to eat, and as I am in no danger of expiring from starvation, I kept moving.
A little past the Akhtamar, I spied a small crowd standing behind an artist who was intent on capturing a portrait of a little girl in pigtails who wore a yellow dress. The crowd seemed more interesting to me than the artist’s subject.
Beyond the artist, I caught sight of what looked like posters in the window of a storefront under renovation. As I approached, it became clear that what I was looking at was an exhibition of Victory Day artwork done by local students who attended a school devoted to the development of their artistic skills.
Some of the images were not at all surprising, given the subject matter and the age of the artist. Here is an image of the Battle of Moscow by a 10-year old artist:
And here is a part of a painting by a 14-year-old, of a soldier’s homecoming (the uneven coloring is the result of a reflection captured from the plate glass):
I have to say, when I look at the depiction of the little girl as she hugs her daddy, and of her daddy standing there with his arms spread wide, a lump forms in my throat, and I give silent thanks that I never had to leave a wife and child behind when I served in the Marines.
Take a look at the little girl in the painting! She not only has her arms around her daddy’s hips, but she is leaning into him, trying to get as close as she can. I think the artist, a girl named Anar, captured this little girl’s moment perfectly.
Some of the other art in the exhibit depicted well-known images, such as the one of Russian sailors storming ashore to fight the Germans after their ships had been sunk under them, and some depicted combat, with its blood, dirt, and thousand-yard stares. Yet there were also pictures of other subjects: medics tending to the wounded under fire as well as other images of soldiers returning home from the front.
As I stood in front of the exhibit, with my eyes wet again, I noted a steady, casual stream of adults and children who stopped and looked at the artwork with interest. All in all, it would appear that Victory Day means a heck of a lot more to people over here than even Memorial Day back home.
By the time I got to the Palermo, one of the French team had attached himself to me, and we had a bite to eat and walked on further, to the market. Despite the holiday, the market was busy as ever. I bought some green “gunpowder” tea from Samarkand and some sour yellow raisins. Over at the next vendor’s stall, my companion haggled over a selection of various kinds of tasty nuts.
At the appointed hour, the bus appeared and our group boarded for the hour-plus trip back to the hotel area. Always mindful of photo opportunities, the bus stopped to allow some of the more adventurous participants to disembark and cross the boulevard and visit the full-scale mockup of a Soyuz launch vehicle on display not far from the main post office. (It’s just not the kind of thing you can see in many places, you know?)
The day had been a long one, with many new sights and impressions to absorb. Along with most of the other passengers, I slept most of the way back to our hotel.
1Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, is commemorated on May 8 in the West; when adjusted to Moscow time, the date is May 9.
Work during the campaign doesn’t typically follow a humdrum 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday rhythm, so after a while, it’s easy to lose track of what day of the week it is. This is particularly true as the campaign progresses and the phases of propellant loading and joint operations are undertaken.
Today was my first turn as the “morning interpreter,” and consequently, as the interpreter at the morning status meeting involving all participating parties. I’ve done enough such meetings – both here and during other assignments – to know that I can do the work, but I still feel a flutter of something in my stomach as I sit down at the table. The meeting went well, and the only “glitches” occurred when I had to ask people to repeat what they said because I simply hadn’t heard them the first time.
A trip has been planned for a small group this Saturday to visit the Gagarin Museum, and I’ve been tagged to provide interpretation. I must remember to record the tour guide’s spiel, so as to have a ready reference should I be called upon to do this gig again. The last time I interpreted at the museum, the guide started out the tour with a quote by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky – a 19th century Russian who is considered the father of space science – that frankly, I did not completely understand, even after I asked the guide to repeat it for me.
Yesterday was the first day where it got hot enough in my room for me to turn on the air conditioner, and the unit continued to operate (albeit not at full blast) all night long. The unit was off during the day, while I was at the office, but I had to turn it on while I was in the room during my lunch break.
In the “any excuse will do” department, the folks running the show arranged for a “Cinco de Mayo” barbeque last night out in front of the hotel. The kitchen came through with some excellent chicken and beef fajitas, refried beans, and Mexican rice, along with more traditional appetiers.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of the evening was to provide a batch of margaritas that didn’t rely on margarita mix (or the glorious sacrifice of mythical numbers of limes). Believe me when I tell you that commercial margarita mix is just not something you’ll find in stores in Baikonur city.
What you can find are various drinks containing alcohol (e.g., gin and tonic) packaged for individual sale. Among candidates that were found during Sunday’s town trip was something that said “Margarita” on the label (маргарита), which was deemed promising, but ultimately lacking, by the judging panel (which included yours truly), and something else called “ДРАЙВ” (a transliteration of “DRIVE”), a lemon and vodka concoction that, properly adulterated with measured amounts of Cointreau and tequila, passed the taste test. If I can work up the nerve, I plan to take a close look at the list of ingredients, whose fine print occupies a goodly chunk of label real estate.
My other contribution to the evening’s festivities included melting cheese and salsa in a rice cooker (which doesn’t work all that well) and heating a few dozen quesadillas of both the seafood and cheese variety on the gas grill. These disappeared quickly among the multinational crowd.
This coming weekend is slated to be a huge holiday celebration for our hosts as they commemorate the 65th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War, so the possibility of another trip to town is not inconceivable. We’ll see what develops.
Cheers…
Yesterday was a pretty long day. The team got to the airport just as the Antonov transport plane was arriving, and the customs formalities went smoothly. I was part of a group that was supposed to go onto the field ahead of the group that was to unload the aircraft, but the authorities let the entire bus through the gate, so there were no worries there.
The Antonov An-124 is a huge aircraft. It can lift over 150 tons of cargo into the air for hops of just over 2000 miles, or smaller loads over longer distances. Our aircraft, the Boris Naginskiy, had a plain white sticker with “FAA Haiti Relief” printed in red affixed to a side wall next to the crew door, above a bunch of other souvenir stickers. I don’t doubt that this crew and aircraft brought in enough food to feed a lot of mouths.
The cargo compartment of the Ilyushin that delivered containers the other day is one container wide and one container high, with not much elbow room. The cargo compartment on the Antonov is wide enough for two containers, with space for someone to walk between them and around the sides. A number of containers and additional equipment came off the back of the aircraft. Here’s a grip-n-grin of me during the offload.
The landing gear at the front of the Antonov pivots, giving the impression of a airplane that can “kneel” to unload cargo from its forward section, after the aircraft’s nose swings up to expose a cavernous cargo compartment, from which the containerized satellite is carefully removed.
Once all the cargo has been unloaded, a look inside the Antonov shows why this plane can be used to transport payloads like locomotives and yachts.
Once the satellite container is outside the aircraft, a crane picks it up and lays it gently on a railroad flatcar. Then a pair of air conditioning ducts are connected, to keep the cargo inside the container at a comfortable temperature. Once everything is strapped down, the train departs for a ride of about 6 hours.
I was the interpreter on the train, which made for a pretty long day (the train arrived at the integration facility at almost 9 pm), but during the ride, I made the acquaintance of Maxime, one of the members of the French security team, who told me about his dream of eventually becoming a fireman.
I spent most of the morning downstairs with ILS management while the French team prepared to remove the satellite from the container and move it to a clean room facility. Tomorrow, I’m the “morning duty” interpreter, which means (among other things) that I’ll be working the morning management meeting and any early morning translations.
Happy Cinco de Mayo!
My stint as the “on call” interpreter was pretty uneventful yesterday, which is as it should be. I received only one call, from the Russian control room, about some technical detail that had to be resolved with the propellant team soonest, and as I had just walked past the team members sitting outside the hotel waiting for the post-lunch bus to the processing facility, the issue was resolved quickly.
The main campaign team arrived yesterday, including the other French-speaking interpreter, so now all we need is a satellite and some support equipment to start working in earnest. Those items and more will be arriving today, aboard an Antonov An-124 transport aircraft.
The situation will be a bit more complex than usual, since aircraft usage has been coordinated to both bring the new “bird” and support equipment in, and to haul the hardware used during the recently completed AMC-4 launch campaign back out.
Based on past experience, my gig today – to support the offload and to escort the train carrying the satellite and equipment containers back to the processing facility – will be a long one even without whatever steps will be required to coordinate the backhaul.
With any luck, that’ll give me some time to further consider this week’s LJI prompt, which has resisted all efforts on my part to find an approach (“punchable face” just doesn’t elicit any reaction), not that something like that has ever stopped me before.
Time to get myself together an go downstairs for breakfast. It’s going to be a long day.
More sessions, and too many at one time, making it hard to choose which ones to attend. Some offer significant added value in the attendance; some don’t (the corresponding paper on the Conference CD suffices).
And some may not be worth going to at all. I ran across an old acquaintance, Paul G., who mentioned that he decided to leave a session devoted to petroleum industry terminology when the speaker described the distillation column as an apparatus in which “long chains of hydrocarbons are broken down into shorter chains” (a function actually performed by various “cracking” units, whereas the distillation column separates crude oil into component fractions, some of which are later cracked).
You can’t win them all.
Next year’s conference is scheduled for about the same time in my back yard, in Denver.
The morning’s program was devoted to the annual meeting of all ATA members, which I decided to skip, as I have nothing valuable to add to the discussion.
My day began by walking to the Marriott from my base near the United Nations. Once in the vicinity of the conference hotel, I kept walking, past The Lion King, past Hamlet (starring Jude Law), and past the Kodama restaurant, where I had lunch on Thursday.
I ended up at another Japanese restaurant called Ryo & You, where I had a very nice meal. Unlike the Kodama, where most of the staff is Hispanic, the staff at the Ryo & You were Japanese, upon whom I could practice my fledgling phrases in Japanese. The lunch special was excellent, but the memory I will take away from the place is the wall of sake bottles labeled with the names of their respective owners, allowing ongoing consumption of the contents whenever they return to partake of a meal.
The sessions I attended were excellent. The first was a terminology “bootcamp” aimed at transltation-related terms. As a translator who came into the business with no formal linguistics training (as opposed to language education, which I do have), I have increasingly begun to understand how the lack of ability to express ideas about what I do acts as an impediment to growth.
The second session was related to conference interpreting and was most excellently presented. (It also gave me another data point in support of my idea that good interpreters are good performers, in the sense of performing for an audience.) I picked up more tips in this session than I do in most sessions.
In between, I wandered the exhibitor area. There would appear to be an ever-increasing number of software products out there intent on competing with Trados, one of the currently better-known translation memory products.
One of these is Snowball, a product being promoted by an affable fellow from Denmark, Erich Hegenberger. I had run across Erich on Twitter some time back, and did a cursory evaluation of an early version of the product (and even provided feedback, some of which influenced the current iteration of the product). I look forward to spending some more time with the updated version of the product once I get back home.
The evening was taken up with the annual Slavic Languages Division dinner, which was held at the Russian Samovar restaurant on West 52nd. A more complete report will appear later, as I am on the hook to provide a review of the festivities for the Division’s newsletter.
I took the opportunity to sleep in this morning, and then to wander Manhattan’s streets in zig-zag fashion on my way from 2nd Avenue & 45th to Times Square. Although I grew up in Queens, just across the East River, I left New York more or less permanently a quarter century ago, so in a way, all of what I’ve seen today seems new and fresh to me.
I managed to show up at the Association’s meeting in time to cast my vote (I’m a certified and hence, voting member), and attended a useful presentation on the use of verbs (“verbing”) in translation, which I am sure sounds dull as beach sand to the uninterested bystander, but the meeting room was packed, and the presenter knew his stuff. I’m ambivalent about the subject, as I think verbing weirds communication.
Afterward, I grabbed lunch at one of those Japanese run-in-quick places before the afternoon’s main event, 12th Annual Susana Greiss Lecture, which this year was given by Pavel Palazhchenko on the subject of Translation and Interpreting in a Pragmatic Age. The talk was well-received, as was the presentation that followed, on Internet resources for translators.
Completely unrelated to the ATA, I called my old Russian professor, who works in Manhattan, but my planning was poor and I shall have to do better next time. Before cutting the connection, my old prof did turn me on to a wonderful store that sells writing instruments (pens) – Arthur Brown on 45th Street just west of 5th Avenue – where I met a breathtakingly knowledgeable saleswoman when I stopped by on the way back to the hotel.
I plans hold, I will be dining with a couple of friends who are also here at the conference, so I should go get dressed. It’s been a good day.
The American Translators Association returned to New York, the city of its roots, for its 50th Annual Conference.
When I registered for the conference two weeks ago, all of the rooms set aside by the Marriott Marquis (just off Times Square and 45th) had been reserved, so after a few more sticker-shock-inducing calls to nearby hotels, I went to priceline.com and bought a room at a hotel near the United Nations headquarters building, six “long” Manhattan blocks from the conference hotel.
Part of the reason for the dearth of rooms two weeks before the conference is that attendance is way up compared with previous years. I buttonholed Walter Bacack, ATA Executive Director, and he told me there were something like 2400 persons registered for the conference.
It’s also likely why the President’s Reception, traditionally held on the Wednesday before the first full program day, was so packed.
It’s off to sleep, as it’s been a long day (I got up at oh-dark-thirty to catch the flight out of Houston).
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