Those of like mind rally round The Day
This English weekly digest has been in existence for four years. Is it a little or a lot? Probably quite a bit, meaning 176 issues, since February 28, 1998, when the first issue came off the presses and because it was the first attempt to make a satellite English periodical as a supplement to a daily newspaper, containing its best features. The translators, apart from a good command of the language, had to understand what was happening in Ukraine, to know about different walks of life and fields of endeavor, which is anything but easy, considering that translators tend to have a narrow specialization. It is also a lot because this independent state is only ten years old. It is little because the project started when Ukraine was entering its sixth year of independence, and it was then that a team was put together capable of making the arrangements for and carrying out the project, little because, strange as it may seem, most readers of the digest had first learned about Ukraine after visiting our web site or happening to buy an issue and then becoming regular readers. In other words, by extending the scope of distribution, the English digest remained for some like Columbus discovering America. It is but little because the digest’s objective is not only to attract people’s attention to a spot on a world map called Ukraine but also to offer a comprehensive picture of its daily joys and sorrows, serving as a kind of seismograph, laying waste to many stereotypes. It is little because it takes decades to shape a country’s international image.
We are happy to know that we have been able to accomplish a lot in the past four years, as evidenced by letters from readers, especially those that have supported the project from the outset. For example, Volodia Pyrih from Brisbane, Australia, thanks the digest for an opportunity to read the latest news from Ukraine. Miguel Fenjak from Wilde, Argentina, writes he could not buy a map of Ukraine in a store, but still the digest remains a source of information about our country and he would like the local press to reprint some of our features. Ukrainian-American Michael Cummings prefers to read The Day on the Internet, he believes it is very good in terms of both size and content. Bohdan Onyshkevych of New York reads Den’ in Ukrainian and lends The Day to his American colleagues. Ahilesh Upadhai of Katmandu, Nepal, wrote to say that The Day helped him and many of his compatriots to discover Ukraine (they had previously had a vague idea about this country as a place somewhere in Eastern Europe where their friends and relatives might travel to study medicine and engineering). Among our readers are people from the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide, foreigners living in Ukraine, and Ukrainians studying English. And so our motto, We Are Read By All, From Student to Diplomat, is not merely a publicity stunt. We value all reader response, and we are especially careful to study criticism. We believe that constructive criticism is a guarantee of creative growth. In this sense the digest has grown notably in the past four years without adjusting to readers’ preferences but rather getting them increasingly interested, developing topics offered by them and holding discussions.
There was a Den’ staffer capable of heading the English digest’s team which played an important role in the chief editor Larysa Ivshyna’s decision to start the project four years ago, Liudmyla Humeniuk. A philologist by training (graduate of Chernivtsi University, with an adequate command of English and French), she quickly put together a team, originally consisting of a translator, consultant-cum-style-editor, and technical editor, and set to work. In the columns by the digest’s founding fathers you can read about how difficult it was at first, how the engineering process and operating mode were gradually adjusted. Incredibly, the digest started working like a Swiss watch after what seemed days rather than weeks. Liudmyla also knew how to combine management of the project with attending conferences and seminars. Last year she went to the University of Sheffield to earn a masters in Political Communications.
The digest team has measured up in every respect and keeps on ticking. The Editors invited all members to write for this issue. They believe the readers will be interested to have a closer look at them, so that when they read every subsequent issue they will perhaps sense the heartwarming energy these people put in it. The Day is a portrait of the entire country painted by a team of professionals united by a single sentiment (highfalutin as it may sound): love of Ukraine, a desire to learn more and more about it, and help it with deeds, not words. All this unites not only us, but all our readers as well. A Crimean Tatar schoolgirl wrote about it in her letter (in good English), thanking the digest for helping her study the language and telling the world about Ukraine. Steve Faletti of the USA sent a letter quite recently, stating that he reads our paper regularly on the Internet and likes its design and how it is easy to read. He thanks us, and we thank you and all our readers. Even though The Day remains a weekly, we look forward to your letters every day.
Prof. James MACE, Consultant to The Day:
I first came into contact with The Day thanks to the efforts of my friend and translator Yuri (George) Sklyar, who called me and offered to introduce me to Liudmyla Humeniuk, first desk editor of the project. After talking things over with her, we then went to Editor-in-Chief Larysa Ivshyna to further discuss the project. It was clear from the beginning of our conversation that this was a project I wanted to be involved with. Having written for smaller circulation journals, the chance of writing for a much larger audience was almost as alluring as the broader task of helping reintegrate Ukraine into the world intellectual discourse it had been violently torn from in the late 1920s. Foreigners writing about Ukraine is one thing, but in order for people abroad to understand this country, the most crucial component is for them to understand what Ukrainian journalists are writing about Ukraine, to understand it through the eyes of Ukrainians before filtering it through the perceptions of someplace else, and to be able to do so without the language barrier. The only joy that can rival that of teaching young men and women is the joy of working with Ukraine’s best translators to tear down the Iron Curtain of language that separates one culture from another. I believe that taking part in this process is one of the most concrete contributions anyone can make to the enrichment of Ukrainian culture through its exposure to the outside world and enriching world culture through its greater exposure to its Ukrainian component.
The Day has grown and developed along with its parent paper, going through changes of personnel and of policy. One thing has not and I think never will change, our continued commitment to quality, the freedom of the press, and unending striving to raise the level of discourse within Ukrainian society and of Ukraine’s discourse with the outside world. Each Day follows another with new information, a new word, idea, or insight. Over the years many definitions of journalism have been offered with perhaps one of the best being “literature in a hurry.” As time goes by, the challenge of keeping pace with it is among the greatest challenges life can offer, and the rewards it bestows are among the greatest and most lasting that can be known. I have found my place, and that place is here.
George SKLYAR, translator:
My first meeting with The Day was highly dramatic, rating a scene in a stream of consciousness movie. It was a late winter evening, I had just finished translating some legal stuff (a cabinet or Verkhovna Rada resolution) for a friend who had promised to pay well. I sat in front of my PC, the monitor a blur in my eyes, trying to muster what cells were still functioning to figure a way out of stupor. Then Liudmyla Humeniuk called, saying they were starting an English language digest based on Den. I never read the press and watch the news only occasionally, mostly when I know there is a new scandal, just to see the clowns at play. But I had happened to look through a couple of issues of that particular newspaper and found it both professional and intellectually oriented.
A couple of days later we met at her office and had a long discussion. There were many problems, of course, above all putting together a team. There was a person, a native speaker, to take care of the editing: Prof. James Mace, an old friend of mine. The first issue was a total disaster, of course. But we hoped that the readers would understand. They did, God bless them. From then on things started to get better little by little. One nagging problem has remained, the difference between Western and local journalism, mainly the way stories go; Ukrainians are like Italians in many ways, sometimes it takes half the story to get to the point and often ten sentences where a couple would do just fine. But maybe I am wrong, because the idea from the outset was to make a real Ukrainian newspaper accessible to the English-speaking audience. Many Ukrainians laugh watching a US movie and hearing a character asking a man who has just fallen out of a window on the fourth floor or received a bullet in his chest from a terrorist’s Kalashnikov if he is OK.
In a word, the project is working, and The Day is popular, judging by the editor’s mail. Most importantly, it helps people overseas (and in Europe, of course) understand that we are not a hopeless case. We are trying to improve the situation.
I believe the prospects are good. I think we need to introduce a feedback column with answers to readers’ questions. We need a continuous dialog. And there are plenty of topics of mutual interest, and we have very good staff authors: Klara Gudzyk, for one. I am happy to translate every text from her!
Lastly, please bear in mind that this digest is made by literally a handful of people, meaning there can be mistakes, technical and otherwise, but trust my word: we do our best!
Have a good Day
Natalia PIONTKOVSKA, technical editor:
“Speaking of the digest, the first sensation that comes over me is that of rhythm. The rhythm of activity draws you, like a whirlpool, into the beginning of a workday and then sets the whole pattern of the actions of the employees, their movements inside the editorial office, contacts with each other, and handling the most diverse equipment.
“This rhythm is a skeleton that supports the structure of our digest full of the fields of information at various levels and of various content, which makes it possible for one to be simultaneously in different temporal and spatial points, discuss all kinds of themes in politics, culture, sociology, history, and international life, teaches one to rapidly switch over from one subject to another, and even to utilize, if necessary, the command of three languages at the same time. This is the rhythm of life and work customary for digest workers. The always composed and invariably helpful editor Marina Zamyatina, James Mace with his never-ending sense of humor (when editing digest stories, he likes to exclaim ‘What?!!’ and then burst into aloud guffaw), our translators — the worker bees who regularly fill the informational honeycomb of the house computers with translated articles, and, of course, the computer makeup designers who shroud the digest’s inner content with a proper external cover — all of them undoubtedly possess a certain magic and administer the sacrament of converting the national Ukrainian daily Den into the English-language weekly digest The Day, which is read throughout the world and thus influences the rhythm of life all over the world. This truly takes your breath away! I have also been working in this rhythm for the past eighteen months. Taking advantage of this occasion, let me promise to do my best to do my duty!
Borys GONCHAROV, translator:
“The first impression I gained from the newspaper was that everything here is being done on a high professional level. Journalists writing for Den/The Day have a particular style of their own, which always presents interest for a translator, as far as adequate English translation is concerned, because we always try to leave intact the individual professional face of everybody without simultaneously breaking the rules of the English language. Moreover, the fact that our translations are edited by James Mace, a high-class expert and a native American speaker, is further proof of our product being quite fit for consumption by the English-language reader. Besides, what we do is also useful for English-language students, for they can learn from the newspaper, for instance, how to render various Ukrainian terms, facts, and things of life into English.
What I like to translate most of all, are articles by Klara Gudzyk. They are often devoted to difficult problems and full of many allegories which should, at first glance, complicate the work. Yet, the course of her thinking is so clear that this, on the contrary, speeds up and facilitates the process of translation. At the same time, I would like to wish some journalists to treat their mother tongue with greater care, avoiding grammatical gaffes and unjustifiably lengthy phrases.
What kind of a digest would I like to see in future? I think it should improve its desidn (combining colored and black-and-white print) and enrich its content (carrying more international news items, articles on the environment and sport, and adding such sections as editorials, obituaries and readers’ letters). Another wish from me personally and, I think, from other people with poor eyesight is to please enlarge the type!
Marina ZAMYATINA, editor:
“Two and a half years ago I came to know simultaneously that there was an English-language newspaper in Ukraine which puts across to foreign readers the views of Ukrainian journalists on Ukrainian and international events and that this newspaper needs a technical editor. To my great pleasure, I was employed and soon saw how interesting even purely technical work could be on this kind of a project. A friend of mine, tired of hearing how delighted I was with the new work, told me a joke about a man who puts the stamps on letters at a post office. Asked if he is tired of this monotonous work, he said indignantly, “Don’t say so! For the stamp bears a new date every day!” Of course, what is new in each of our work weeks is not only The Day’s date and issue number. Now my job is not confined to technical things only: every morning I look through the fresh issue of Den to decide which of its stories might be interesting for our English-language readers. And every time, in so doing, I see either a new name under the article (this is always interesting, for a new author means a fresh viewpoint and style of writing), or a new piece of information missing from other newspapers or television news I had just heard, or an unexpected interpretation of some talked-about events, or an interview with a person I did not know before or knew in an entirely different light. Deriving pleasure from the newspaper, I feel like sharing it with the digest readers: this means the article will go to our translators, then from them to James Mace, and, finally, straight to The Day’s pages, to the readers. You really feel pleased when you learn later from a reader’s letter or phone call that he/she liked precisely the article that we also considered the gem of the issue.
How should our digest change in the future? Of course, I wish it only were for the better! But, in general, we are in any case continuously changing and developing, as is our big brother (actually, parent) Den. Sometimes the readers give good advice: for example, there were a few recommendations to publish more articles on Ukrainian history, interesting life stories of the common people (what is known in Western journalism as human interest stories). Or take even such a small thing: to enrich our ‘What’s On’ section with the repertory of one or two movie theaters, in addition to that of drama theaters, concert halls, and galleries. New design techniques are coming, which we think make the newspaper pages easier on the eye and attract more attention to texts. Another innovation which, rather, belongs to Den: by suggestion of editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna, the Ukrainian-and Russian-language versions have been carrying for several months the translated column of our consultant Prof. Mace, which, by all accounts, Ukrainian readers like no less than their Western counterparts. Perhaps something else will change in the future. What exactly? We will see together with our esteemed readers. In any case, there will be something new, and not only the date on the postmark.”
Larysa VYDOLOB, design:
Olena DUDKO, design:
Tetiana KAZANSKA, senior designer:
