Science Garage in Russian. Experience translating an American show

In this article, I will share my experience in translating an American automobile popular science show, and talk about some of the features of translation. The article will be useful to those who are going to translate and voice something technical from English. You will find out what you have to face and, probably, you will find the very kick of motivation that you lacked.



After the appearance of a car in my life, an unbridled craving for understanding its structure, as well as the device of various nodes of other cars, awoke in me. In search of information, I climbed onto YouTube, but found nothing truly interesting. Basically, all Russian-speaking bloggers do reviews on certain cars, not talking about either the design or the technical features. And if a rare person talks about the device of something, then this video is for half an hour, a lot of empty information, the absence of any structure of the narration, and most importantly, many terms whose meaning is not explained.

And then one day I came across an American show Science Garage on the Donut Media channel. My admiration knew no bounds. Everything is clear, structured, understandable language, informative and with humor. English-language material, as a rule, is of higher quality, since the language is international and in English they make content anywhere in the world, hence the great competition that motivates people to improve quality. This applies not only to automotive topics. And so I began to translate this show for myself, just to understand what was being discussed and not to miss a single detail. And since in any case I am doing this kind of work, I can also make more efforts from above and share the result with others. Surely there are people who are also interested in this topic, but the language barrier does not allow them to fully enjoy the content.


The first video I made about the turbosystem. And then I ran into certain problems that I did not suspect. I learned that Russian terms are about 3 times longer than English, which is why I have to chatter. For example, “crank shaft” - 2 syllables, “knee-length shaft” - 5 syllables. You say that it is possible to reduce to three syllables “crank-shaft”, but the Americans also reduce to one syllable “crank”. Anyway, it turns out that in one syllable of the English word, I need to accommodate three syllables of the Russian word. I feel, damn it, Tina Kandelaki. And there are a lot of such examples. “Valvetrain” (read as “Valve Train”) - 2 syllables, me-ha-nizm ha-zo-ras-pre-de-le-ni - 11 syllables. Speaking of gas distribution ...


The second video is about the timing mechanism. I learned that there are terms that do not have appropriate analogues in the Russian language, or that have too many of them and their meaning varies from garage to garage. I tried to optimize the translation so that everyone could understand what was going on, plus I also added a feature with tooltips that suggested additional variations of a certain term. But even here I could not foresee everything. For example, the fact that the "hairpin" can also be called the "pin", and the "pushers, rods and rockers" can be rockers.


The next video is about tuning. I realized that tuning is something other than replacing car covers and tinting windows, and also learned that many people have not yet caught up with this. Trying to distribute the video, I visited various communities of the VKontakte social network that have the word “tuning” in the title. Basically, these are shops selling all kinds of stickers, headlights, knobs on the gear knob ... This is what they call tuning. Indeed, it is easier and cheaper for some people to stick stickers and tint a car than to improve the performance of their car by replacing structural elements and tuning the engine, and other people are doing business on this. This, in my opinion, is the most underrated movie at the moment.




The next three videos are more narrowly focused and are dedicated to the features of unusual engines of Toyota, Mazda, Subaru and Porsche brands. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the cohesion of car owners of these brands. The most close-knit and friendly community of car owners is of course Subaru. A large number of live, active, uninhabited publics. Something is always discussed, exchanged. The number of subaru communities that posted the video I have proposed exceeds the number of all other communities combined. But the “toyotovtsy” are also not inferior, or rather their separate caste of “marvodovs”. Owners of "markoobraznyh" cars on the JZX platform are also quite close-knit and friendly guys. Unfortunately, there are not so many owners of Mazda rotary engines in Russia (to say nothing of it, in the world as a whole), although these engines deserve attention no less.

About advertising, promotion and the future of the channel

This is all, of course, good and interesting, but is this necessary? I ask myself this question every time I sit down to translate another video. The only thing that motivates me is attention to these translations. I don’t want to do nothing, I want people to watch it and I knew that I was trying not in vain. The Internet, with all its competition and commerce, dictates its own rules. There is advertising - there are views. Administrators of large autos will not post in their scientific and entertainment videos simply "because they are cool." That is why I decided to write an article here. I want to get the attention of advanced geeks, get your feedback and maybe some advice. Let me know if you are interested in this topic. Thank you very much, if you read to these lines, I am very grateful. And, of course, a special thank you to everyone who has already supported me at this stage,for your sake I try.