Very lame: Google Translate and Russian

If you doubt how silly it is to offer Russian translations without the options of "stress" marks, just read the Amazon customer reviews of Kristine Kershul's "Russian in 10 Minutes a Day" which has gone through more than one printing.

In Russian, lexical homonyms - words appearing to be spelled the same - are not homophones and often not even cognates.  In English you might have "Cut a record" versus "Record a disk".  I believe that in most English dialects, the stress shifts for the noun as opposed to the verb.  In Russian, two such words could have entirely unrelated meanings, rather like "Tie a bow" and "Bow down before the king"

In English, it suffices to offer a phonetic equivalent to capture the difference.  Not so in Russian.  Russian  requires that you know the stress mark.

If you check the articles on some Russian persons of note at en.wikipedia.org you should be able to see how often stress marks are being used.

In the past, in order to present stress, you required a separate font, such as that sometimes still used at russian.cornell.edu

Since the advent of UNICODE stress marks, all that is required is to add an optional stress character after a vowel in the stressed syllable.

Just how silly this is at google translate can be seen by attempting to translate "opera and ballet" from English to Russian.  All is fine unless you intend to use these words in conversation.  Clicking on the "romanization" button is to no avail.

Sometimes a "phonetic romanization" will tell the story for those Russian vowels which are reduced when they do not occur in the stressed syllable.  One Russian variant of E - E with  a diacritic trema - only occurs in a stressed syllable.  But by and large, if you want to pronounce a Russian word that has more than one syllable, you must know where to place the stress accent.  Otherwise it can be more serious than simply placing the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLABle.

Of course, even last week, GMAIL spell-check rejecting "opthamologist" and "romanization" (also flagged in the editor here at blogger.com) is silly but does not render the tool next to useless.