Do My Homework For Me

[lucy24]

There's a forums rule about quoting emails. If I adhered to the strict letter of this rule, I would not be able to tell this story. Blinders on, everyone.

While running the latest batch of logs, I noticed one human repeatedly visiting the same page, and then repeatedly hitting the Contact page. The result, it turned out (I had to fish the email out of a folder, which is why I didn't know about it sooner) was, in paraphrase:

Sender is a university student who has been given the assignment of translating suchandsuch passage in the mixed-language text, Latin and Old English, that they had spent so much time visiting. Target language unspecified, but they came from Yandex, and their IP is in Russia. (If they had been from South Asia they probably wouldn't have gotten in.) Old English into Russian? Old English into modern English?

This led into, verbatim:

unfortunately, i couldn't find it on the internet, so im asking you to send me the translation of it. i hope you'll send me it asap

Uhmm... Yeah. You betcha. I’ll get right on that.

I get a fair number of “do my homework for me” visits, but usually it doesn’t go beyond pasting an assignment into a search engine. For sheer brazenness this one takes the

:: detour to search engine ::

kulich, possibly.

[not2easy]

I don't think this was the kind of emails that the rule was written to cover. I cannot guess who, when, where from it and it doesn't seem to expose any known individual's silliness. Aside from that...

Good grief.

[creeking]

reminded me of this old translation story

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

[tangor]

If there was no "please" with the demand I generally give it no further thought.

We live in interesting times where common courtesy is not taught nation to nation or generation to generation.

[LifeinAsia]

If there was no "please" with the demand I generally give it no further thought.

The same sentiment if the request lacks punctuation or proper capitalization.

[ronin]

If there was no "please" with the demand I generally give it no further thought.

We live in interesting times where common courtesy is not taught nation to nation or generation to generation.

Sure. But in a closely-connected multi-cultural world we probably all need to familiarise ourselves with a little cultural relativism, too.

In the mid-1990s I spent 4 months living with a Russian host family in a provincial city in southern Russia. After the first month they had to request very explicitly that I stop saying pozhaluysta (please) and spasibo; (thank you) all the time, and consequently obliging them respond with a similar level of politeness (which to them was uncomfortably formal, especially to another family member - even a temporary one).

Of course I struggled. I wanted to say please and thank you in Russian as often as I did so in English. I struggled even to understand why that should make anyone feel uncomfortable. But, over time, I did start to get it.

The important moral of this story (and many others) is that Russian is not English with the English words swapped out and Russian words inserted in their place. It is a different language. A Russian speaker learning English and an English speaker learning Russian are both unlikely to appreciate they are using inappropriate amounts of... syntactic sugar.

All that said, what outrageous cheek.

[lucy24]

A Russian speaker learning English and an English speaker learning Russian are both unlikely to appreciate they are using inappropriate amounts of... syntactic sugar.

Indeed. It is even possible to utter “please” in such a tone as to make the request more insulting than it would have been without the “please”.

[tangor]

Point well taken, but that is more about the culture, not the language!