3
votes

I am tasked with preparations of technical negotiations with a foreign company where the technicans' native language is Russian. I would like to have a technical dictionary for terms specific to the IT industry, more specifically the networking and management segments to be able to translate things like

  • software package
  • network switch
  • ip address
  • settings dialog
  • property

into widely-understood and unambiguous Russian counterparts. Where would I ask/look for one?

My trouble with general-purpose dictionaries is that their translation proposals, if applicable at all, often are extremely cumbersome and poorly understood. Anybody who has seen a badly localized application should instantly know, what I mean. And for those who haven't:

broken smoke pipe

Is this your idea of a broken pipe?

10
  • 2
    I would look to hire a Russian speaker to do this.
    – user9517
    May 21, 2014 at 15:50
  • 7
    In soviet Russia, pipe breaks you. May 21, 2014 at 15:59
  • 1
    Not a complete answer, but one thing that might help would be to compare translated versions of the same program (e.g. Firefox), since the translations are often done by native speakers with IT experience. If you're in a Linux environment, you can also explore the gettext message catalogs in /usr/share/locale. You can view the English and translated version with msgunfmt file.mo | msgcat -. This isn't exactly what you're looking for, but if you end up having to do it yourself, it may provide you with some useful words and phrases. GNU coreutils has "Broken pipe" as "Обрыв канала". May 21, 2014 at 17:01
  • 2
    I recently watched an episode of House M.D.(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pox_on_Our_House) where they needed a Dutch translator, so House paid for a webcam session with a Dutch stripper. Would this be a possible route? Can't be too difficult to find a Russian speaker.. May 22, 2014 at 10:19
  • 2
    Professional translators should be able to do this - especially an authorized bureau. They will have contacts within the relevant industries that can review the texts. It's not cheap, though. If your company isn't willing to pay, you might contact a Russian university - probably some IT students will be willing to help you for less money than the professional translator would require.
    – Jenny D
    May 22, 2014 at 11:25

1 Answer 1

0
votes

I finally managed to find an online dictionary which has provided me with the basic vocabulary at http://translate.academic.ru

Best of all, it has passed the "broken pipe" test: academic.ru translation screenshot for "broken pipe"

Using gettext catalogs in locales in Linux installations as suggested by @JamesSneeringer is also an excellent starting point when dealing with Linux-related projects.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .