When the Russian Academy of Sciences is powerless

If you have enemies, recommend them to study as philologists or editors, and then go to work in game dev. They will beg for mercy, looking in the dictionary for viewport playlists , callbacks and rigging , and you will laugh maliciously. But this will not last long. At some point, the pain will subside, humility will come and an incredibly interesting quest will begin!



Editors from the copywriting department of the Krasnodar studio Plarium often come across words that have not yet been added to any directory. In this article, they will share their working methods and give several cases.

Why are there so many words whose spelling is not fixed in the dictionaries

In the field of IT, a lot of terms are used that come from the English language. Specialists are constantly applying new technologies or tools whose names are of foreign origin. For some, Russian-speaking counterparts are selected, but most often no one bothers with this.



Each time, writing the word in Latin is rather inconvenient. Therefore, people begin to Russify it, modify it, supply it with prefixes and suffixes that are characteristic of our language. And this is far from being done in unison: at different venues and in different circles you can find several spellings of the same term.



Scientists meanwhile quietly stand aside and observe the process. When the term takes root and takes on its final form, its spelling will be displayed in the dictionary, but until that moment more than one year will pass. Naturally, reference books do not keep up with the creation of words. Especially in the field of information technology, which rams space-time at a speed close to the speed of light.



Editors have no time to wait for fresh dictionaries. They often meet new terms in texts and try to use them as competently as possible. Therefore, they are engaged in constant research.

How spellings are chosen

There are several ways. First, our editors try to understand which existing rule of the Russian language can be applied to a particular word. If there are no such rules, they look for similar words that have already been recorded in official sources.



Take production , for example. The English word production is pronounced with a subtle ə at the end. When it came to the Russian language, two spelling options appeared: production and production . Fortunately, here you can rely on other similar cases that are already reflected in the directories: reception , action , promotion ... The same thing with a brand book , lookbook and handbook - you can safely write them together after an already familiar notebook .



But, unfortunately, not all terms have analogues with an already established spelling. If they are found in texts, editors analyze all the use cases that they find on the network - in books, on websites, forums and other platforms.



To illustrate this case, let's look at the term backend . It is found in dozens of guises: backend , backend , backend , backend , backend and so on. And if the second part is still added, you get monsters like a back-end developer or a back-end developer (the latter is hardly even a word).



The backend is the leader in terms of use on the network, but our editors were not satisfied with this and decided to ask the Russian Academy of Sciences, the most knowledgeable organization in terms of spelling, for advice. The answer was something like this: "Guys, we do not know, sort it out yourself." The guys sorted it out, having decided now and forever to write a backend and a backend developer .



Of these complex words, there is also a low poly model . All attempts to write it in Russian fail: it turns out either a low-poly model with two hyphens, or a very strange and unnatural low-poly model . Since there was no successful solution, we agreed to use the expression low-poly model or leave the Latin alphabet.



Also, when writing borrowings, editors often rely on transliteration trends. This is the principle of transferring the signs of one writing with the signs of another. If we consider examples of terms from the English language, it turns out that the same letters behave in a certain way from time to time. For example, in the words frame rate , flash mob and hashtag in place of English a , Russian e appears quite naturally. To analyze such cases, our editors work closely with fellow translators.



But this is not the only reason to knock on them in the messenger. When the question arose of writing the term saber , the answer was found in the original language. The fact is that in English there are two principles for writing a word: through a hyphen with a prefix of the gradation sub- when we talk about hierarchies in the structure of posts, and separately when we mean the head of a selected function within a department ( Sub Team Leader ). In our text, we were talking about tims inside the department, so the editors stopped at the second option. By analogy with the Latin prefix sub- , which is written together with various parts of speech, sub- is also attached to the lead .



Even in difficult situations, you can always seek the advice of programmers, artists and other experts. They will tell you how the term looks more familiar, in what form it is most often used in correspondence. This helps to make the right choice, because the texts are written primarily for people - they should be comfortable reading them.

Total

In this article we have given several examples of working with terms that are not fixed in dictionaries. As you can see, each of them requires an individual approach and the study of all existing cases of use. Below you will find a small glossary in which the most correct, in our opinion, spellings are listed. Perhaps someone will save time and effort.



PS The glossary reflects our current experience. Trends and norms are constantly changing, so adjustments may be needed in the future.