Russian translators were faced with an ugly task the first week of the Olympic games. Try to make sense of a snowboarder’s bro-ish lingo. Not surprisingly, it didn’t go well. Slopestyle gold medalist Sage Kotsenburg proved to be the most difficult.
“But this was not the most complicated (thing),” Lesokhin’s counterpart Oxana Yakimenko added. “In Russian, a ‘grab’ is a grab, ‘cab’ is like cab, and even though there’s a Russian word for rail, we say, ‘rail.’ But jump is ‘tramplin,’ and a spin is ‘vraschenije,’ and flip is ‘salto.’”
What about “stoked”?
After a pause and some prodding, Yakimenko admitted, “We used the word for ‘under the influence of alcohol’ which is kind of like, ‘under the fly.’”
Lesokhin mostly noticed that Kotsenburg “said ‘sick’ a lot.”
The Russian word for sick, bolnoy, “is bad, like you have a disease or something,” Yakimenko said. But there are plenty of Russian words for crazy, so the duo substituted “bezumny,” “kruto,” or “sumasshedshy.”
“You have to prepare for jobs like this,” Lesokhin said. Fortunately, the interpreters had watched Kotsenburg’s runs on TV with Russian commentary so some of the tricks were already ingrained.
So, just to review here: if you were a Russian listening to Kotsenburg’s interviews, you think he was either
a) drunk
b) dying of Malaria
This probably qualifies as a #sochiproblem