Question

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to translate an English sentence into Russian, but I'm not sure how: "being able to make a living doing something I love would be wonderful."

This is just beyond me. I've come up with something so mangled I'm embarrassed to show it to anyone, so I could use your help. (I'm especially confused about how to handle the "would be" part in Russian. I'm sure there's something simple I'm forgetting, but I just can't think of how it's done.)

Comments

[mricon.livejournal.com]

Don't translate—transform. The sentence you're trying to translate is very English and doesn't lend itself easily into Russian. One could try something like that:

Зарабатывать себе на хлеб занимаясь тем, что мне нравится, было бы замечательно.

But that sounds rather awkward.

Change the sentence to be more conservative: "I would love to be able to make a living doing something I like." That is much easier to translate and sounds quite good:

Я был бы рад зарабатывать себе на хлеб занимаясь тем, что мне нравится.

[kutsuwamushi.livejournal.com]

Thank you! For some reason it didn't occur to me to rearrange it like that, but that works very well.

[cema.livejournal.com]

Rearrangement is the first thing you need to think about when translating.

[mricon.livejournal.com]

"делая что-нибудь, которого я люблю" means "doing someone I love" which is quite amusing and gives the phrase a whole new meaning. :)

[giantantattack.livejournal.com]

Haha, I had just realized that there was something wrong there and was going to correct it, but you commented before I got a chance. :-)

So, if the original sentence was
Мочь зарабатывать на жизнь, делая что-нибудь, которого я люблю, было бы замечательно.

Would this be better?
Мочь зарабатывать на жизнь, делая (то? or того?), что мне нравится, было бы замечательно.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

This sounds completely English, this is not the way Russian language works, and smells English from miles away :) You cannot just translate it word by word - you have to construct the phrase like a Russian, which, in this case, means that the whole phrase must be rearranged - like mricon does above, only forgetting about a comma. So the [more or less] correct version would be,
Я был бы рад зарабатывать себе на хлеб, занимаясь тем, что мне нравится.

Or я была бы, if the speaker is female.

[battersby.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that with translation from any language to another, if you try word-for-word, it will always sound awkward, and rarely makes sense.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

This is correct, even for closely related languages like Polish and Russian.

[hellga.livejournal.com]

Another possibility is "Как замечательно было бы зарабатывать себе на жизнь, занимаясь тем, что мне нравится"

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

yeah, one could even drop "мне" in this case, thus completely avoiding the direct signs of the fact if the speaker was male or female :)

[nbuwe.livejournal.com]

I wonder if I haven't had enough coffee or something... But how does "мне" betrays the gender of the speaker?

[temcat.livejournal.com]

It doesn't. But it makes sense to drop it anyway because of its redundancy.

[wolk-off.livejournal.com]

It didn't, my explanation was hasty and thus poor, but, believe me, it'd be better to drop it :)

[cema.livejournal.com]

Вот было бы здорово, чтобы заработка на любимой работе мне хватало на жизнь! (This is very approximate, of course. Notice that some of the shades of meaning have been lost.)

[a-garvey.livejournal.com]

Было бы чудесно, если бы было возможно зарабатывать тем, что тебе нравится делать.