27/08/2009

Social networking sites (my personal impressions) part I




      It`s a fact that Russia is overwhelmed by the variety of social networks and a lot of people spend their working time not working but sharing news with their virtual friends and exchanging information. Nowadays I can say for sure that they are the main mean of communication in Russian society...And I`m not an exception!...First I needed them to practise languages, to find new useful information about people all over the world....but now I like not only investigate but also just chatting...Oh my god...it`s unbelievable!...
But what really matters for me now is that you can know nothing about your interlocutors` age or social status but his nationality is clearly felt, and it`s not very hard to define it if you are an experienced "social network resident"...
Of course, it`s just my opinion but it was formed during the weeks of observation and analysis.
    Now I can say that:

- people from Latin America are very suspicious and they really want to know why you added them to your friends;

- people from Africa and Arabic countries are eager to communicate, but their English is very poor, Turks - no comments (some of them are real gentlemen! but someitmes they can be very vulgar and rude);

- the most open-hearted are Russians and Europeans, they are easy to get in touch and just talk without any questions.

Of course, people are different, and they behave this or that way under the influence of their own reasons...anyway...it`s up to a man to choose the way to follow and communicate.

Sites to see:

http://socseti.com/category/raznoe/

http://www.pravmir.ru/article_3174.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_service

    Please,feel free to add more sites on the topic!

Social networks in Russia

   To be continued...

08/05/2009

"TARAS BULBA": my impressions and thoughts

         I saw the film on the 7th of April (five days later its release) and it had a firm grip on me. I went out of the cinema like striken and all was flowing before my eyes - so deep my perception was!  My heart was filled with various feelings: I asked myself where that great Russia is! Why did we lose our great power?...Actually, I`ve already got this film on my comp,...but I have no resoluteness to see it again, no courage to be dissapointed...

...Not to speak about feelings! It is a historical drama film, based on a novel of the same title by Nikolai Gogol. The movie (alternative title Zaporizhian Sich) has been filmed on different locations in Ukraine such as Zaporizhia, Khotyn and Kamianets-Podilskyi as well as in Poland. The film was partly financed by the Russian Ministry of Culture and has been criticized in Ukraine for being political propaganda and to "resemble leaflets for Putin". The Ukrainian-born director Vladimir Bortko has also stated that the movie was aimed to show that "there is no separate Ukraine". He was quoted as saying: "The Russians and Ukrainians are the same people and the Ukraine is the southern part of the Rus'. They cannot exist without us and we cannot without them. Now we are two states and also in the past there were such periods. The Ukrainian soil belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and to Poland. But the people who lived on both territories were always one people. Gogol understood that well and always spoke of it." This view is strongly opposed by sections of the Ukrainian society. In Russia there are fears that the movie will exacerbate historical disagreements with Ukraine.

The film is also cautiously watched in Poland, where its possible anti-Polish character is widely discussed and its propagandist elements examined. This is enhanced by the fact that the filmmakers added some scenes depicting Polish brutality to the original plot by Gogol.

Of course, this film was not created to be historically precise. I think it reminds both Ukraine and Russia that we are united, we have the same roots, we have always been connected by the fraternal friendship...and now...what do we have?  We are loosing our faces sharing grounds  and proving who the strongest is!!!! Shame on YOU!!!!

In the forum I read a lot of commentaries both Russian and Ukranian spectators. A lot of discontent! I can`t understand :they judge if it`s good or bad only by the actors and costumes and so on!!! And what about feelings this film aroused?

I quite agree with a man from Russia Ivan Denisoff who commented: "This movie is about tremendously difficult choice between different values, between devotion to motherland (fatherland) and love for a woman, between traditional values of Russian people and values of west though in this movie we see how allegedly enlightened polish gentry (regarding itself as beings of higher order than cossacks ) executes cossacks in the most cruel way." That`s the point!!!  At the heart of the film is great Russia. In the opening scene, Bulba, played by the extraordinary Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka, rallies his soldiers with a speech that was committed to memory by generations of Soviet schoolchildren: “No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has given, all that is within you.” 

Bad reviews began coming in from Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, well before the film opened. 

“Russian history is short of heroes, and they are borrowing others’,” sniped Oleg Tyagnibok, the leader of the nationalist Freedom Party. Writing for the Unian news agency, Ksenia Lesiv asked, “Israelis and Palestinians — are they also one people?” And Volodymyr Voytenko, a prominent Ukrainian film critic, said long stretches of Mr. Bortko’s film “resemble leaflets for Putin.” 

“It’s a very imperial film, that’s what I’d like to say,” said Mr. Voytenko, who founded the film journal Kino-Kolo. “Everything else follows from that fact.”
op Ukrainian officials did not attend the opening in Kiev on April 2. But viewers who emerged from the first showing said they found Mr. Bortko’s message of pan-Slavic unity deeply moving. Yulia Velichko, 20, a student, hesitated at the idea of rejoining the Russian fold, saying, “We fought so hard for our independence.” But her companion, Valery Skuratov, was convinced. 

“We should join Russia,” he said. “We’re closer to them than we are to the Amerikozy,” a mildly derogatory term for Americans.
At the film premiere in Moscow’s Kinoteatr Oktyabr, which seats 3,000, the audience applauded at Bulba’s “Russian soul” speech, and then again when the Cossacks thundered through western Ukraine, holding torches, to drive out the Poles. Among those who felt exaltation was an ultranationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. 

“It’s better than a hundred books and a hundred lessons,” he told Vesti-TV after the premiere. “Everyone who sees the film will understand that Russians and Ukrainians are one people — and that the enemy is from the West.”
 Anyway , the film provokes discussions and opinions and this is what real art must do! Hope I`ll take heart to see it again ...but I know tears will be in my eyes, and my heart will ache...

Interesting to read:

http://globalcomment.com/2009/the-politics-of-taras-bulba-do-they-matter/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/world/europe/13cossacks.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

http://www.day.kiev.ua/201827/

http://ruskino.ru/mov/8500/photo - фотографии со съёмок

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242457/

20/01/2009

" I have a dream..."

This phrase belongs to the fighter against racism in the United States Martin Luther King. He used it speaking about equal rights of all Americans and believing that his dream of just society would come true. To my mind, Obama`s election as a president is a good example that black Americans have followed his call for assertive selfhood, taking part in the ranks of professionals, intellectuals and political leaders. NO to racism, YES to common sense!

 

What is your attitude to the problem? Do you think Obama will make the United States flourish?

20/01/2009

Translation of films

          Everyone knows that one of the component of any foreign film is its translation. We can say for sure that 80 % of the success of the film falls to the share of translation. In fact, the translation of high quality (in the first place) means having a good command of a native tongue.  Actually, in the article I`d like to draw your attention the author names several components: enough time for translation, its detailed editing and of course, profound knowledge of languages and wide outlook. Unfortunately, today we have a great volume of work (I mean, films for translation) and not enough good specialists to do it. Thus, we have that what we have.

 To study the problem is possible here: 

 - www. poliglot.su/scoring.htm

- www.trworkshop.net/lib/articles/2.htm

If you find new information on the topic, please, add it to this note.

           

31/12/2008

Christmas

        There`s no doubt that this holiday is loved by both grown- ups and children. If in the past its basis was exclusively religion, nowadays it`s a family feast with definite traditions in which a mythical figure named Santa Claus plays the pivotal role. Actually, its symbols (a fir tree, candles, giving gifts) also have no religious meaning.

 

          I`m inclined to think that nowadays a religious component of the holiday isn`t of paramount importance. It`s mostly a secular family holiday which is also celebrated by non-Christians. In many countries it lost its religious meaning without a trace. It`s celebrated as a kind of performance. In Mexico, on days leading up to Christmas, the search of Mary and Joseph for a place to stay is reenacted and children try to break a piñata filled with toys and candy. Christmas is a great summer festival in Brazil, including picnics, fireworks, and other festivities as well as a solemn procession of priests to the church to celebrate midnight mass. In India, the fir as Christmas tree is replaced by the mango tree or the bamboo tree, and houses are decorated with mango leaves. Japan serves as illustration of a different sort. There, in a predominantly Shintō country, the secular aspects of the holiday—Christmas trees and decorations, even the singing of Christmas songs such as "Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer" or "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" —instead of the religious aspects are widely observed.

Useful information: - www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas

                                          - www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_worldwide

                                          - www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_card

                                          - www.holidays.net/christmas/

                                          - www.soon.org.uk/christmas.htm

                                          - www.cresourcei.org/cyxmas.html

20/11/2008

November 20th - International Day of children rights
 

When we see a baby in a cradle and his tenderness is inspiration, the younger deprive of hope where the convulsive environment injury them and us in this century of the big developments. A world of new technologies, even more the increasing moral and climate unbalance. We wonder..What will happen with them?. May be will be possible live in the equilibrium of the necessary things and fight for challenges in an internal fight to help the usual nor unusual, the interest nor the uninterested wondering where is going o­n our internal child, the child we have birth, the child that need us.There are places they are abandoned, they are easy target, they are outraged and the probes are hidden.
 
During the Convention for the rights of children signed this day November 20th, the date the Assembly approve the Declaration for Children Rights in 1959: Right to the Education, Right to the Identity and the Family, Right to the Participation, Right to the Protection, Right to the good Health.
 
During the peak of the millennium, politics leaders made rules for the eight most important principium of the Millennium(ODM) they started reducing the poverty and the needing to stop the increasing virus of VIH and the firm conception ofthe universal primary school till year 2015, these concepts are pointed to the humankind mainly to the childhood.
 
UNICEF and governmental and private organizations around the world are working hard to protect them even that, we know in every place violence is more frequently as we think. Today children are ill treatment physically, psychically they’re abandon, suffering of Munchausen’s syndrome, most of them are punished by people who are in charge of their security.
 
The children are members of the society with less capacity of self protection, children in the school, in the orphanage,in the streets, in zone of wars, in centers of exclusion, in fields, in factories..
 
This is a disturbing and persistent situation in several parts of the globe. In each child I’m from my childhood so different to gave them love I wish to shout for the life, so I hold them: The children in Kenya, 93% are orphans shattered by VIH , the younger immigrants expulsed from the borders, the prisoners children in Paraguay, the whipped in Arabian, the killed in the Congo Republic, whose are demanded hard worksand prostitution in Africa and Thailand, the children soldiers in Sri Lanka and Colombia, like these more cases are happened , right there where the protection seams is a hard and insufficient work in this modern present time we are living. All these make us watch the existence of a isolate love into the loneliness of the children. If we o­nly see our own around without showing others that there are more children living defenseless, is possible to add in the fight with this children eyes, they need us never mind their races and traditions, they are also our children,
 
To you, my child:
Hold your heavy load
Take down the strength of the inertia
Come to the sparkling down
And wait
Sat o­n the soft seat in the grass.
 
 Susana Roberts,
Poet, Windows Live Messenger
Argentina
November 21, 2006

What`s your opinion on the point? It`s very interesting to see your attitude to the problem under question. Feel free to write in my blog, express your thougts and offer your ways to correct the situation.

 

 If you`re interested, you can find a lot of information on the following web-sites:

- www.peacefromharmony.org

- www.actagainstviolence.apa.org/materials/index.html

How Did Colón Become Columbus?

Explorer's Name Varies From Country to Country
By Gerald Erichsen

       The basic explanation of that is actually fairly simple. Columbus' name in English is actually an anglicized version of the Columbus birth name. According to most accounts, Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, as Cristoforo Colombo, which is obviously much more similar to the English version than is the Spanish one.

       In most of the major European languages, Columbus' name is similar to the Italian one: It's Christophe Colomb in French, Kristoffer Kolumbus in Swedish, Christoph Kolumbus in German and Christoffel Columbus in Dutch.

       So perhaps the question that should be asked is how Cristoforo Colombo ended up as Cristóbal Colón in his adopted country of Spain. (Sometimes his first name in Spanish is rendered as Cristóval, which is pronounced the same.) Unfortunately, the answer to that appears to be lost in history. Most historical accounts indicate that Colombo changed his name to Colón when he moved to Spain and became a citizen. The reasons remain unclear, although he most likely did it to make himself sound more Spanish, just as as many European immigrants to the early United States often anglicized their last names or changed them entirely. In other languages of the Iberian Peninsula, his name has characteristics of both the Spanish and Italian versions: Cristóvão Colombo in Portuguese and Cristofor Colom in Catalan.

      Incidentally, some historians have questioned the traditional accounts surrounding Columbus's Italian origins. Some even claim that Columbus was in reality a Portuguese Jew whose real name was Salvador Fernandes Zarco.

      In any case, there's little question that Columbus' explorations were a key step in the spread of Spanish to what we now know as Latin America. The country of Colombia was named after him, as was the Costa Rican currency (the colón).