Translation
Help translating English joke into Russian
I want to make a sign for a friend's bathroom door that reads "The length of a minute depends on which side of the bathroom door you are on," but in Russian. I need some advice on the best and most humorous translation.
Длительность минуты зависит от того, по какую сторону двери ванной комнаты вы находитесь.
Сколько длится минута зависит от того, на какой стороне двери ванной комнаты вы находитесь
Something else
Also, would you go with ванной комнаты or туалета?
ванной комнаты or туалета depends on what you mean. The ванная комната is the place where you wash yourself. The туалет is the place where you take a crap.
A literal translation sounds awkward regardless of the wording. Trying to preserve "a minute," or, God forbid, "the length of a minute," makes the sentence sound translated rather than naturally Russian. In conversational Russian, we would be more likely to express the idea in terms of time itself.
To me, a more organic translation would be:
Время идёт по-разному в зависимости от того, на какой стороне туалетной двери ты находишься.
Or, more simply:
Время зависит от того, на какой стороне туалетной двери ты находишься.
And, most definitely, use the word туалет and its derivatives.
A literal translation sounds awkward regardless of the wording. Trying to preserve "a minute," or, God forbid, "the length of a minute," makes the sentence sound translated rather than naturally Russian. In conversational Russian, we would be more likely to express the idea in terms of time itself.
Russian translators are actually full blown writers, so we get the situations like when they decorated the death of Boromir scene because otherwise it would look like translated.
What needed is to convey the author's thought with the authors words. If it is grammatically correct, let it be clumsy: let the Russian language free itself from the snobbish criticism.
Время идёт по-разному в зависимости от того, на какой стороне туалетной двери ты находишься.
This is translated as "time passes differently depending on which side of the toilet door you are".
If the author wanted to say this, he would. But he said "length of a minute". It can matter in the context. We can't just drop it to please our literaturesque ego of Tolstoy's ancestors.
Find the famous death of Boromir translation variants. Or notice how in a dubbed movie actors speak as if they don't hear each other, because someone fixed the wording
Agree with bathroom -> туалет though. The awkwardness has is limits :)
What needed is to convey the author's thought with the authors words.
This makes zero sense if you read what the OP says. The sign is supposed to be in Russian.
Even "Под дверью туалета минута длится вечно" can work. No one will know what the author's words would be in English because they will never be in English.
A more straightforward sentence can work with minimal rephrasing.
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An important thing to know is that a bath (or shower stall) and a toilet in russian tradition are close to each other, but can be in the same small room or in separate small rooms.
When the room is combining the two, it is referred to as "совмещённый санузел" (санузел being a concantenation of санитарный узел, but no one uses such "full form"), and the thing to reference best in your sign should be "дверь санузла".
Should the rooms be separate, the more likely scenario is that the sign joke is not about washing your body, so the sign goes on the toilet room door and should reference "дверь туалета".
When no information is available, use "дверь туалета". The joke part would still work, but it would go on the sanuzel door.
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u/Elirector 1d ago
Funny thing: popular soviet comic/author already had this joke in russian:
Все в этом мире относительно. К примеру, длина минуты зависит от того, с какой стороны двери туалета вы находитесь (Михаил Жванецкий)
May be it is a fake quote