Voting has started!

Hi everybody! How are you?

First of all, sorry for having been silent for 2 weeks. The reason is simple and trivial: I've been extremely busy. One of my recent projects has actually given me an idea for one of my next blog posts. It's going to be about proofreading. I still need to think it over and, hopefully, you will see it next week.

I am very happy to be so busy now. My daughter's summer vacation starts soon, so it would be nice to earn some extra money now in order to work part-time the rest of the summer and spend as much time with my beautiful daughter as possible!

Besides, we are starting the remodeling in our apartment. Hopefully, we'll be able to finish everything before July 16th. My niece is getting married on July 16th, and according to the Russian tradition the groom has to 'buy out' his bride. The process does involve some money, but the poor groom also has to do a number of funny tasks if he really wants to get married. So, since my niece's parents live on the 1st floor and we live on the 7th, our apartment was chosen as the place where the first stage of the wedding will take place. The higher the bride lives, the funnier it is ;-) And we'll make sure it IS fun!

But the most important news that I'd like to share with you is that the voting time for your favourite language lovers has come!

My Facebook page (join me there!) didn't make it to the voting stage, but I am not upset about it. However, you can vote for my Twitter account! All you need to do is go to this page and vote for @Olenkaarakelyan. Thank you in advance :) I really, really, really appreciate your support! I can see the number of my followers and subscribers growing and it gives me much joy to see so many language professionals among them. Needless to say, I follow my colleagues, too!

However, I don't think it would be honest to finish this post now. Why? Because there are other categories in The Top 100 Language Lovers Competition. You can also visit the links below and vote for your favourite:

Language Learning Blogs

Language Professionals Blogs and

Language Facebook pages

The winners will be announced in June! So we won't have to wait long :)

Translation Forum Russia 2017: my report

A few days ago I came back from Translation Forum Russia which took place in Ufa, Bashkortostan . My daughter Delia went with me because she never visited Ufa before (neither have I) and because of the trip to the Southern Ural mountains we planned to take after the conference with a small group of colleagues. Ufa is not considered one of the primary tourist attractions of Russia, though I am convinced now that it definitely should be. Some pictures of the city (not all of the pictures are mine, some were made by the official photographer of the conference Elena Ekaterininskaya, our company CEO Fedor Kondratovich and some other colleagues): The bee is a symbol of the region as Bashkortostan produces the best honey in Russia. We saw installations shown below in different parts of the city. There were still covered because of the cold weather, but they will be full of blooming flowers as soon as the warm weather comes. The bee as we saw it That's what it...

10 interesting facts about the Russian language

In my previous post I promised to follow with the interesting info about some other languages. So here are 10 facts about the Russian language which might be of interest to those who are studying it. If you would like to have this list in Russian, please contact me and I will send it to you by email. So, what do I find interesting about my native language? 1. Russian has about 500,000 words, but only 2,000-2,500 of them are used frequently. 100 most frequently used words make 20% of all written and oral speech. A high school graduate's vocabulary usually has 1,500 to 4,000 words. Those who have graduated from a higher educational institution normally have a richer vocabulary consisting of approximately 8,000 words. 2. It's compulsory for all astronauts in the international space station to learn Russian, so we can call it an international language of space :)

Russia Day

Today is June 12th , one of the newest holidays here - the Day of Russia (or Russia Day ). Even though it's a national holiday, it's not as widely celebrated as other holidays, because it's relatively new and because the reason for picking this date and the origin of the holiday itself is not quite clear for most ordinary Russians. That's why I decided to make a little investigation concerning the history of the holiday. And that's what I found out: The holiday dates back to 1990 , when on June 12th the Russian parliament officially declared the sovereignty of Russia . That was a tough time for our country, the time when former Soviet republics were declaring there independence and did not want to do anything with Russia. So that was the day when our parliament oficially adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. That's the beginning of modern Russia with its emphasis on civil rights and democracy (su...

Your professional translator

Search This Blog