— Hello, I am Spider and I speak a couple of languages.
— (*everyone*) Hello, Spider.
— I am also a Grammar Nazi.
— …
Linguistic experience (certificates and other proofs available on demand):
- Russian: many years ago won a district literature contest; participated in many online writing contests, won some of them; got a “Written Russian” Brainbench Master and a “Russian Reading Comprehension” Brainbench Master; published around 10 peer reviewed articles; wrote many big Wikpedia pages from scratch; fluent in reading, writing and commenting on other people’s bad grammar.
- English (since 1990) — finished a “Writing English for Publication” course; got an “English Vocabulary” Brainbench Master and a “Listening Skills” Brainbench Master; authored several dozens of peer reviewed articles ranging from 2 to 256 pages; gave uncountable presentations and lectures; fluent in reading, writing, talking and tweeting.
- Dutch (since 2001) — fluent in casual conversation; gave some presentations; supervised students; fluent in reading and talking, with writing taking slightly more effort; never took an official course, nor passed an official exam; was a proceedings editor for WCN 2011.
- German (since 2009) — started to fake it with my Dutch knowledge; managed to pass the official TestDaF exam with 5/4/3/3 (enough to enroll as a student to most German universities); retain advanced reading and intermediate speaking skills.
- French (1993–1995) — started learning; gave up.
- Latin (1998–2000) — started learning and slowed down considerably after some time; managed to maintain some basic knowledge.
- Japanese (since 2003) — developed some listening comprehension skills due to wonky subtitles; reading hiragana only; probably not useful for this wiki.
- I can read most of the texts in Ukrainian and Bulgarian, but I don’t really speak those languages.
Translating experience:
- Some tech articles and hacking manuals in late 1990s: from English to Russian, alone.
- House MD, weekly subtitles of seasons 4–8: from English to Russian, as a part of the famous Sovereign Leprosarium group, in which I was among the core editors.
- For Wikipedia and domain specific wikis’ sake, translating a lot of things on various topics from English to Russian, on a daily basis.
