Saturday, December 12, 2009

Creator sighting!

David Gallaher, writer for Hulk: Winter Guard, dropped by the comments section of column #143 and said "Fake Russian in Winter Guard? Hardly. All of the Russian phrases, spellings, and translations are correct. Would you like a translation key?".

My apologies, I took note of the word "ponchiki" because I didn't know it, and then, when writing the column, without the comic book in front of me, just my notes, I didn't notice that I had typed "pochiki". I couldn't find that word anywhere, even with alternate spellings (but alas, never the right one), so I marked it as a made up word. Honestly, when I was writing it, I thought "the rest of the Russian looks flawless, I should go back and check if I took note of the word correctly"... but I didn't.

You'll forgive me, I don't claim to be perfect, but I'm so jaded about writers and languages other than English (what they do to Spanish, for example, is heartwrenching), that I sometimes, unwillingly, slip up. I hope you can forgive me, and thank you for that comic, I have a soft spot for Soviet-inspired stuff.

2 comments:

David Gallaher said...

No bother, really. I'm giving you guff. But, Steve Ellis is a fluent Russian speaker - and I also took some extremely in-depth notes.

"Ponchiki" are Russian doughnuts.

"Nu pogodi" whihc Ursa Major screams to memembers of the Remont 6 is taken from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu,_pogodi!

Hope you enjoyed the book otherwise.

MaGnUs said...

Yeah, after you posted on the column, I went to the comic and saw the right word, googled it, and found the doughnuts. When it comes to languages I don't speak (and to anything else in my column), I usually do in-depth research through the web, amd I saw that "Nu, pogodi!" toon, makes me wanna check out Youtube for a sample.

Did you see the Russian Winnie the pooh cartoons? Awesome stuff. And yeah, I did enjoy the book, I'm particularly fond of big clunky armor guys like the Dynamos, and Russkie stuff in general. Take care.