Tuesday, February 17, 2015

Gref Gaidar, what a guy

Gazeta. ru, talking about the anti-crisis economic plans in Russia, asks: Сможет ли Греф стать Гайдаром наших дней

Bing translates that as: If Gref become Gaidar now
And Google does worse: Will be Gref Gaidar our days

The ли makes a yes/no question out of the word it follows, so "Can Gref become the Gaidar of our time?" is right translation. Bing's "if" is wrong, but better than Google's ungrammatical "will be Gref Gaidar", which makes it sound as if "Gref Gaidar" is one guy instead of two. Also, once again, Google completely misses the point of the genitive case; it's not "our days", it's "OF our days".

Anyway, Russians better hope the answer's NO. Gaidar and his pal Chubays didn't do Russia any favors back in the 90s. Gref's going to have to do a lot better.
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1 comment:

  1. Kathie3:54 PM, February 17, 2015

    Looks like our profession still won't be endangered by computers for quite some time to come :-)

    ReplyDelete

Experimenting with full moderation; I've been told that will cut down the spam. We'll see how much work it is... and how it works. Given that -I- work, you may have to wait to see comments show up.