Thank heavens Russian doesn’t have apostrophes. There is such misuse of them around English, some examples are so appalling, they look funny. The gloomy thing is they appear or, for that matter, are missing from dominant public signs. An odd typo in a letter can be pardoned, but if something like a shop sign goes through many hands right until it’s finally placed where it should, it’s surprising not one person should spot the error before it becomes part of united states.
Apostrophes are, in fact , so easy to use. They denote any possession and are used with after an “-s” in a noun in the singular and following an “-s” in a noun in the plural. If a noun forms the plural for an exception, i. e. without an “-s”, then the first law applies (e. g. children’s toys). The pronouns which in turn stand out here are its and theirs. They denote some sort of possession but have no apostrophe. Where you see “it’s”, the exact apostrophe is used to show a grammatical contracted form of “it has” or “it is”.
You don’t need to fight with apostrophes in Russian – they don’t exist. However , that doesn’t generate Russian translations punctuation any easier. In fact , Russian punctuation includes very strict rules. So strict that a student just who misses out a comma in his essay will in order to get an A mark for his work. That’s why most people, Russian translators, need to be so careful when we type in place a translation. If we happened to miss out a comma or a semicolon, the Russians reading their client’s mouvement would strike it off as careless or terrible. Certainly not something we are trying to achieve.
And certain unique punctuation rules should be noted in Russian, too. Where there no quotation marks in book titles or provider names in English (e. g. Jane Eyre by way of Charlotte Bronte, BBC), rather than italicizing them, Russians apply quotation marks. We have to remember this rule when we translate documents from Russian into English and remove the line marks (e. g. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, Russian Railways) so they don’t stand out as cozy.
I guess rules are made to be broken but why hassle when someone made an effort to create them? Rules will there be for a reason. They are designed to lessen the confusion and already plenty of it about!
Waheat 