Translation: participles, reported speech and calques
A translation passage of five sentences carries 10 marks and must be finished in 20 minutes. The sentences are: (1) 'The novel written by Chekhov is on the table.' (2) 'I don't have enough time to read it.' (3) 'She said she would come tomorrow.' (4) 'The student reading a Russian newspaper is my brother.' (5) 'One must work carefully with the dictionary.' The instructions say: translate into natural Russian, keep Russian punctuation, and do not translate word for word. Ameya writes: (1) «Роман, написанный Чеховым, лежит на столе»; (2) «Я не имею достаточно времени читать его»; (3) «Она сказала, что она будет приходить завтра»; (4) «Студент, читающий русскую газету, - мой брат»; (5) «Нужно работать аккуратно с словарём».
1. Evaluate sentences (1) and (4): are the participles and punctuation correct? Explain the choices and one common error for each.
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(1) Correct. «Написанный» is a past passive participle formed from написать, agrees with роман (masculine, singular, nominative), and the agent is in the instrumental: Чеховым. The participial phrase after the noun is set off by commas.
Common error: «Роман, написанный Чехов» - dropping the instrumental ending. Another is using написанный with a feminine noun without changing the ending.
(4) Correct. «Читающий» is a present active participle from читать, agreeing with студент, and the phrase is comma-delimited.
Common error: using the present passive читаемый. It exists, but it is bookish and does not mean 'who is reading'; for 'the student who is reading' only the active participle works. A second error is placing the phrase before the noun without adjusting commas. Participles must agree in gender, number and case, and the agent of a passive participle must be instrumental.
2. Correct sentences (2) and (5), and explain each correction.
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(2) «Мне не хватает времени, чтобы прочитать его». The construction не хватает + genitive expresses insufficiency: не хватает времени, денег, сил. «Я не имею достаточно времени» is a calque: иметь is not used this way in ordinary Russian, and достаточно itself governs the genitive (достаточно времени). The infinitive clause is natural as чтобы + infinitive when the purpose is explicit.
(5) «Нужно внимательно работать со словарём». Two fixes: English 'carefully' here means 'with attention', so внимательно, not аккуратно (neatly); and со is used before словарь because the word begins with a difficult consonant cluster (с + consonant), as in со стола, со мной, со словарём. The dative after с is correct: со словарём.
In both sentences the error is a transferred English pattern, not a missing Russian ending - a reminder to translate constructions, not words.
3. Correct sentence (3) and explain how Russian reported speech differs from the English pattern here.
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Correct version: «Она сказала, что придёт завтра».
What Ameya did wrong: «будет приходить» is a future imperfective meaning 'would come repeatedly / would be coming', not a single future event. The English 'would come' is a sequence-of-tense form, but Russian does not shift the tense in reported speech: the future stays future, expressed by the perfective present-form придёт. The conjunction что is obligatory, and a comma precedes it.
Optional refinement: if the subject is the same, the second «она» is usually omitted: «Она сказала, что придёт». The time word завтра is kept as in the original unless the report is made much later, in which case a different time expression may be needed.
Principle: English backshifts tense (will → would); Russian keeps the original tense and changes only pronouns and punctuation. This is one of the most frequent translation calques in the paper.