Login or register (free and only takes a few minutes) to participate in this question.
You will also have access to many other tools and opportunities designed for those who have language-related jobs (or are passionate about them). Participation is free and the site has a strict confidentiality policy.
15:58 Jan 7, 2012
Russian to English translations [PRO] Art/Literary - Poetry & Literature / dialogue
Russian term or phrase:Берегите природу, вашу мать!
This clever phrase comes at the very end of an opera.
"Вашу мать" в смысле, что мы должны сохранять "нашу мать, природу" но конечно
в этом есть элемент ругательства.
Some years ago the ad campaign for a brand of margarine used the slogan, "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature!" (See the a YouTube video of one of the commercials here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLrTPrp-fW8) The idea was that the margarine was so good it would even fool Mother Nature. She would respond with thunder and lightning. The slogan became a popular meme that morphed into "Don't screw with Mother Nature!" as a popular saying with the same basic idea: There will be a price to pay if you do something to harm the environment.
only in variations with other words when forming a phrase.Considered separately these two words express a great dissapointment, unability to say a word, and, that's why three dots after could be desirable.
Mr Korovkin's idea is of a classy fielder too, but "call" has too obvious a meaning, I'd rather use "cry"; that which was said will stay transparent.
most fundamental one, is that for those of us who have been out of high school for quite some time now it brings in a certain racial undertone which is undesirable generally and totally out of place in this particular case. After all, there are no black (er... pardon my French, African-American) ghettos in Russia yet. Or are there?
On a separate note, I find the very fact that someone even brings up Titus Andronicus these days unambiguously commendable. It is indeed a sign of hope. Apparently, those high school lunches weren't all that bad.
"Yo mama" throws it clearly into the domain of slang, which suggests the obscenity in a way that just "mother" does not (thank goodness, speaking as a card-carrying mother). As to Titus Andronicus, I leave that for another day. My, this Kudoz discussion has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again (I never could stand that play...)!
Oh never mind, I forgot about Titus Andronicus:
Demetrius: "Villain, what hast thou done?"
Aaron: "That which thou canst not undo."
Chiron: "Thou hast undone our mother."
Aaron: "Villain, I have done thy mother."
So now we are kind of split between "your mother" and "yo mama." Are they not the same thing? I would hear the following exchanges almost every day when I went to high school just a few years ago: "What do we have for lunch today? Your mother./Yo mamma." "What's on the exam?" "Your mother./Yo mamma." Is everyone aware about this usage, or is it newfangled slang for some? Just wondering.
Но что страннее, что непонятнее всего,
это то, как авторы могут брать подобные
сюжеты, признаюсь, это уж совсем
непостижимо, это точно... нет, нет,
совсем не понимаю.
Please, think, what kind of intonation the author might have choosen for it if pronounced. IMHO,it could be pronounced in genial vein, nay, solemnly, histrionically, even pathetically. Its obscene part is visible through the transparent simplicity and the incongruity could be recognized only with a second look.
Wikipedia is only a sometimes reliable source. Whether "motherfucker" actually conjures up the literal image it describes is a matter of the culture of who's speaking and who's listening. In some contexts, where its use consists of about 75% of the words in a given sentence, it may be stripped of all literal meaning (although I doubt it). But IMHO, the words "mother" and "fuck" are about the two most emotionally loaded words in the English language (maybe in any language). Someone would say "motherfucker" instead of simply "fucker" for the very reason that the former is emotionally stronger (I'll kill you if you insult MY mother...). Which is all a long-winded and academic way of saying that I agree with dacs04's post on "what the fun is about." I think Mikhail Kropotov's entry is good from this standpoint.
A foreign journalist, representing a GNUS newspaper. Already funny for native speakers of Russian because gnus in Russian is a general name for blood-sucking insects.
Save the Nature, your mother. Nothing funny about this for a foreigner. For a native speaker of Russian (adult or teenager), this is a hint of the obscenity "I fuck your mother", without naming the obscenity. The fun is that the foreigner, who uses the phrase, can't see the underlying second meaning.
The correct translation would be a normal phrase in English, which prompts an obvious English obscenity in such a way, that the hint would be obvious to native English-speakers, but not so obvious to foreigners.
Such a translation would be a masterpiece to be included in famous dictionaries and translators' textbooks. I wonder if the opera in question deserves such efforts.
if you don't mind some swearwords, then possibly a blend of the answers already provided might work - "protect nature, you motherfuckers!". However, the slogan "Берегите природу, вашу мать!" is not explicitly offensive, so i personally would stick to “Protect Nature, your mother!”, maybe with an additional instruction for the actors to say it in a derisive way, to make it sound like the second part of "f..k your mother!"
Journalists around the world have been crafting headlines for the story of a man swallowed by a crocodile. The headlines come in from all around the world, with various journalists reading their version aloud. It's the one above that gets the best response:
The translation workplace 
