Some thoughts about professional translating into Russian language from beginner Well, I had hard days yesterday and day before. I take a retraining course as a translator. It will take 2 years. I have theory of translating, Russian and English stylistics, practice of written and oral translation, regional geography (we'll study geography, culture, history of the USA and Great Britain) and etc. I want to study English more profoundly. Also I want to have an additional income working as English-Russian legal translator. When you're not a lawyer it's not easy to understand and translate correctly english legal terms. In any case, I'm know that I'll need English language for working as a lawyer. I tell you all this to explain why the whole monday I was translating a legal article into Russian. It was my first professional home task. I get a lot of pleasure doing it because I needed to scrutinize a russian insolvency law to find equivalents. That was useful because I'm going to write a course work about bankruptcy procedure in Russia in spring. The main challenge was in understanding differences of financial terms (commercial balance sheet and the excessive indebtedness financial statement) and finding correct equivalent because I don't know accounting and I see no differences between them. Besides, I tried to be correct in Russian legal language. English words usually more polysemantic (have more meanings) than Russian. They imply more subjects. For example, when I was first-year law student I was given a task to translate an article about philosophy of law. It was intricate. The word "law" was used in each sentence. However, sometimes it was used as 'a system of rules', sometimes as 'an individual rule as a part of such a system'. It was a complicated philosophical article. So, I was totally confused and understood nothing:) *In Russia 'law' has a general meaning as a set of rules* I was so careless that I thought about 2 meanings when I had almost finished translating. After that revelation the article began making sense for me :) When the article says 'an order of the court' it is obvious that it is a binding decision of a court. In Russian language it can be described in many ways, in different terms. They depend on a stage of a procedure. A translator should read context (the text) carefully and choose the best term. Thank you for reading.