Tania was my first Ukrainian friend. When I worked in subtitling+localization, she was on the team of language specialists. A Russian language specialist joined their team, and they were good friends. When I would hear them getting coffee or eating lunch together, I could never tell if they were speaking Ukrainian or Russian. It was enough for me to tell they came from two countries who shared a long history but still two independent countries.
She and I worked on an 80,000+ word menu in Russian (she speaks Ukrainian, Russian, English, who knows what else in that beautiful head of hers). It was for a Blu-ray movie collection set to be released in Russia. Since Blu-rays have loads of special features, trivia, games, it was a *huge* menu (this one also included film history). It had been translated from English into Russian, and Tania could tell the Russian translator had been overwhelmed and made a lot of mistakes.
That Blu-ray menu was in our lives for weeks. I remember walking up to her desk and seeing it open on her screen, and I would ask if I could bring her food or water or any type of sustenance. I was just the middlewoman between the client and the production teams, no language skills here, so all I could do was offer my support. She found every mistake, every typo, every oversight, every inconsistency, and fixed them all. She made it through every round of quality control, patiently answering all my questions since the Russian Cyrillic alphabet was lost on me. I was so happy the day I walked over and could tell her, “Let’s go for drinks – the project was approved and shipped, you did it, it’s gone!”
May life imitate that project.
May Putin make all the mistakes.
May Ukrainians find every mistake, receive the support they need, and persevere.
May we all be able to celebrate when he is gone from their country, and may he walk away with a better understanding of human rights and the power of patriotism.
coming full circle 