Wednesday, December 28

Translation practice

Today you will receive a small excerpt in English to practice your translation skills.Tomorrow, we will send the answer keys and some comments about this text. Try to do the translation with your own words before consulting the dictionary.

“Around eight in the evening of Sunday December 8th 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, picked up a phone call on a top-security line. The caller was Stanislav Shushkevich, a modest physics professor whom Mr Gorbachev’s reforms had placed at the helm of the Soviet Republic of Belarus a few months before. Mr Shushkevich was phoning from a hunting lodge in the magnificent Belovezh forest to tell the great reformer that he was out of a job: the Soviet Union was over. (...) The previous Sunday, Ukraine had voted overwhelmingly to ratify the declaration of independence from the Soviet Union which had been passed in its parliament, the Rada, immediately after the August coup.”

We strongly recommend this article from the Economist. It has a great perspective about why Russia has never accepted Ukrainian independence.