Forum | PolishOrigins :: View topic - English - Ukrainian Translation Service

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kcarnley
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Joined: 16 May 2012
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Posted: Tue Jul 09, 2013 7:11 pm Post subject: English - Ukrainian Translation Service

The researcher I hired in Ukraine found my grandfather has a cousin still living in our ancestral village and provided me with her address. I am finally taking the time to write a letter / send photos and I will need to have the letter translated into Ukrainian. Searching on-line, the best price I have found is $35 per page. This seems excessive for an informal letter. Can anybody recommend an inexpensive service I could use? The only alternative I have found is a Ukrainian Orthodox church about an hour away I could possibly visit in hope that somebody would assist me.

Google and Bing Translate are fine for websites but I just don't trust their accuracy for a letter to an 80 year old cousin I've never met. My hope is that if we can establish communication one of her children would have access to email for future conversations.

Thanks,

Keith

Elzbieta Porteneuve
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Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 2:53 am Post subject: Re: English - Ukrainian Translation Service

Keith,

If you use simple short sentences, like in school, Google or Bing translate will do well (translate one by one, check the reverse into English).

Do you have a university or research labs near your place? Or a library? There have always students or interns from many countries. For such a short letter you could ask. But frankly, in your first letter you will speak with your heart and pictures, simple sentences who you are, suggesting the common ancestor was that and that person, do not worry, it will do. Ask your supposed cousin to write you, tell his story.

An 80 years old will understand Russian. Even today young Ukrainians still speak and write Russian, many speak Polish - not necessarily write Latin, but definitely speak.

Bonne chance!
Elzbieta

Magroski49
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Joined: 10 Nov 2008
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Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 5:37 am Post subject: Re: English - Ukrainian Translation Service

Elzbieta Porteneuve wrote:

An 80 years old will understand Russian. Even today young Ukrainians still speak and write Russian, many speak Polish - not necessarily write Latin, but definitely speak.

Bonne chance!
Elzbieta

Elzbieta,

Your answer raised a question that has had my curiosity for some time: was the cyrilic language (written) used in Russia, the same used in Ukraine and Belarus? Still is?

Gilberto

Elzbieta Porteneuve
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Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 8:16 am Post subject: Re: English - Ukrainian Translation Service

Magroski49 wrote:

Elzbieta Porteneuve wrote:

An 80 years old will understand Russian. Even today young Ukrainians still speak and write Russian, many speak Polish - not necessarily write Latin, but definitely speak.

Bonne chance!
Elzbieta

Elzbieta,

Your answer raised a question that has had my curiosity for some time: was the cyrilic language (written) used in Russia, the same used in Ukraine and Belarus? Still is?

Gilberto

Gilberto,

Your question is a complex one.

When you look on standards used today in official UN documents, recorded by ISO, you have:

RU:
Romanization systems: 1) Russian BGN/PCGN 1947; 2) GOST 1983

UA:
Romanization system: Ukrainian national romanization 2010, approved by the United Nations in 2012.

BY:
Romanization system: BGN/PCGN 1979 (be), 1947 (ru); Belarusian national romanization 2007, approved by the United Nations in 2012 (be), GOST 1983 (ru).

The Soviet Union existed between 1922 and 1991, 70 years, 3 generations.
The split of the Soviet Union did happen in 1991, 22 years ago, one generation ago.

For 70 years all former components spoke and wrote Russian. Please read about Stalin's position on language's differences here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_alphabet

When UN was set up in 1945, one of the first necessary things was to have names of all countries written correctly in few languages, so have all scripts romanized, to help communicate. The first Cyrillic romanization came in 1947, still used for Russian language.
The ISO 3166 standard keeps record of all romanization tables used, we can therefore observe significant changes in last 15-20 years. The references I quoted above are current ones, and reflect growing awareness about differences.

Back to your question.
With the development of IT, Internet, we now have Unicode tables for everything; there is 100 thousand different "characters", as many variants as a collective collaborative work could permit.
You have all Cyrillic letters in Unicode described here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script_in_Unicode
You will see that the basic Cyrillic is the same, Ukrainian and Belorussian use two Latin-looking letters, i and ï. In visual you can spot all those small differences on the keyboard, here http://r2u.org.ua/wiki/keyboard/UkrainianUnicode (that article is not about comparison, but their keyboard is very good).

The people 40 years old and above, those who left schools before the split of the SU, all speak and write Russian.
The young ones learn Ukrainian or Belorussian.
The most visible pain is when a country changes its script, back to Latin, like in the case of Moldova (their language is Romanian). Quite often the 40+ cannot write correctly in Latin, too difficult to learn. Their kids write Romanian very well.

Best,
Elzbieta

kcarnley
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Joined: 16 May 2012
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Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:11 am Post subject:

Elzbieta,

Thanks for the advice. I will give the online translators a shot. I know what you mean by doing a reverse translation. I've used this technique on the Polish language forums. Sometimes the translation is dead-on and other times it is nowhere close. I will include an English copy of my letter as well. Perhaps if there is difficulty understanding she could find somebody that knows English. Her children live in cities near Lwow and might have better access to translators.

The universities in my area are small and not very "international". If I needed to have Spanish or any number of Asian languages translated I would have no problem. Not many Eastern Europeans here (Texas).

Keith

Magroski49
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Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:39 am Post subject:

kcarnley wrote:

Keith,

You can also post a message in http://genforum.genealogy.com/ukraine/ and see if anybody helps you translate it.

Gilberto

Elzbieta Porteneuve
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Posted: Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:45 am Post subject:

kcarnley wrote:

Keith,

It's an excellent idea to include English copy. You may as well add a copy in Polish - there is still a lot of Polish living in Lwow area, and a significant part of population speaks Polish.

Best,
Elzbieta

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