For those who don’t know, my wife-to-be Catherine works in a museum – she’s something like the Curatorial Administrative Assistant (which is to say the general dogsbody) at the Fleet Air Arm museum. It’s quite an interesting job, and the museum is an interesting place to visit if you’re ever in the area.
Part of the thing that the museum does which isn’t on general display is related to archives, which includes archives of books (I imagine they have things like the complete Jane’s manuals and wotnot). Recently they came across a book with a Russian title and a Russian inscription inside the cover. This is where the favour comes in…
Above are two images (click on them for bigger versions), one of the cover of the book and one of the inscription inside the cover. It occurred to Catherine that I know a few people who speak/read Russian (as the ZX scene is very big in the East), so this is a request for a translation of the text in the above images. The cover is theoretically quite simple, but the inscription is hand-written and so is trickier to work out using Babelfish.
Any help would be much appreciated – just add a comment to this post with a translation.
6 Comments
Severnyi bastion Rossii – “Northern Bastion (Rampart) of Russia”
I can’t translate the rest, I’m not too good in Russian. It’s for native speakers. There’s something about Southhampton and it’s dated on 25th September 1991.
Yeah, the date part is the only bit I can easily work out – didn’t spot the Southampton reference (it’s on the south coast of England, in case anyone doesn’t already know, although in this context it could easily be the name of a ship).
Thanks for the title – the book is about military naval “stuff” (I’m making that assumption as most of the books Cath deals with are about military naval “stuff”). I think hand-written text is tricky anyway, even when it’s in English.
The second inscription is friendly message from Russian warship to British warship: “To chief cabin (saloon ?) of torpedo boat “Southampton” from chief cabin (saloon ?) of torpedo boat “Fearless”, 25 september 1991″
Ah, thanks MacB. LaesQ mentioned he pointed you to the blog :)
Yeah, the translation makes some sense. GF was curious about the actual ships mentioned, so I think she’s going to do some research. Personally I only know of HMS Fearless as being a British ship, but then it’s not really my area of speciality.
Thanks again for the translation.
Thanks everyone – the translation helped us to find the source of the book! No-one at work believed that Rob had friends who could translate Russian because of his interest in Speccies!
2 Mrs Bod-to-be:
Generally, they are all speak/read in russian (and i`am not exception ;)
Simply, all men have a secrets ;)