Your professional translator

Hi everybody! How've you been? Has 2017 been good to you so far?  My 2017 has been very busy, although I have been working on getting back to the balanced lifestyle. The more busy I am, the more I realize how important it is to give myself enough rest, physical activity, and pleasant emotions. And the best thing that unites all three of the aforementioned aspects is of course travelling. A few days ago I took a short break and went to Saint Petersburg with my daughter and my nephew. Saint Petersburg is more than just a city. It's a historic legend, UNESCO World Heritage sight, and definitely one of the must-see places in the world. My break was short, but it was so good that I decided to share our itinerary with you just in case some of my readers find themselves in the situation when they have just 3 days to spend in Saint Petersburg and they can't decide where to go and what to see. Especially if you are travelling with teenagers (my co-travellers are 12 and 18 yea...

Translation played a huge part in Russian history. It all started in 864 AD when the two Byzantine Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius were sent as Christian missionaries to the Slavs . They were the authors of Cyrillic system that is now considered one of the most used writing systems of the world (this is not my opinion, that's what Wikipedia says ). And then they translated the New Testament, the Psalms and some more religious books.  So our nation, our Orthodox church and our mentality now are to a great extent based on what those two brothers did, including their translation work. Later in history, a  lot of famous Russian writers and poets were also brilliant translators. They opened a whole new world of prose and poetry to the Russian people. And I am sure you have heard at least some of these names I am going to share with you today!

On Saturday Delia and I were invited to a very interesting exhibition. There were wax figures of different mythological characters of Russia and other countries. Plus the figures could move and some of them could speak (well, they didn't move the mouth, but we could hear their voice). Both Delia and I loved the exposition and were sorry that there were not so many figures. And then I thought that you might probably be interested in some of the Russian folklore characters we saw there. The hall of the exhibition was pretty dark and unfortunately my camera refused to take high quality images in this case. But I think you can still get an idea of what all the characters looked like. Of course there was Baba Yaga : Kids absolutely loved her. Then there was Koschei the Immortal . I loved that figure! It was absolutely in tune with my perception of Koschei.

I almost missed an important holiday last week - the Day of Russian State Flag. The day was established in 1994 and is celebrated on 22 August, but it is a normal working day. Would you like to know more about our flag and its history? I'd love to share some facts with you.

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 :)

A couple days ago I went to a party in my daughter’s kindergarten dedicated to Women’s Day. And there, the kids even went into a deep forest to congratulate Baba Yaga. And they found out that she is not as evil as fairytales tell us. She may have a bad temper, but after all, she is a woman, too. ;) That gave me an idea to write a blog post about some feminine characters in Russian mythology. And guess who will be the first one I mention? Baba Yaga Here are some pictures of this well-known character: