A couple of problematic translations I picked up, both medical:
- I ran to the recruiting office at once. I had angina, I still had a high temperature. But I couldn't wait.
Angina, is of course, a mistranslation of the Russian ангина, which is pharyngitis, or whatever the vernacular equivalent of this condition is (a bad case of sore throat). In English, angina almost exclusively refers to a heart problem.
- I was second-year student at the paramedical-obstetric school in the city of Sverdlovsk
At first I thought that the word obstetric was wrong — put alongside paramedic, it begged for being midwifery; but then I glanced in the original and saw that the Russian is фельдшерско-акушерская школа. I don't know whether there is a native English equivalent for the Russian feldsher (apparently from the German word for field surgeon, and recorded in Merriam-Webster as feldsher) — it is an untranslatable beast similar to the candidate of sciences — but whatever it is, it can't be paramedic. A paramedic is a санитар.
