Soviets, Britisher Find Just the Right Words to Chat

Lady Elizabeth Wilson had this steadfast rule for her Soviet editors who struggled to find everyday usages for the words in her English-to-Russian dictionary: “Nothing that could appear in Pravda, only what you say to your husband at breakfast.”

Her insistence on colloquial Russian translations--the language heard in homes, streets and marketplaces from Moscow to Minsk--has paid off for Lady Wilson, the elderly, no-nonsense widow of a former British ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Scholars are raving over “The Modern Russian Dictionary for English Speakers,” her compilation of more than 75,000 English words and phrases and their everyday Russian equivalents. The green-bound volume is the fruit of an unprecedented collaboration between an English-speaking author and Soviet editors on a bilingual dictionary.

For Lady Wilson, it is the result of eight years of shuttling between London and Moscow searching, so to speak, for just the right words.

Published jointly by Pergamon Press of Oxford and New York, and the Russkii Yazyk publishing house of Moscow, the dictionary is a big seller among the Soviets. They tell her that “it’s just like a novel--we take it to bed with us,” she said. Sales in the Soviet Union, where it appeared in 1982, are expected to reach 250,000 copies by next summer. It’s moving more slowly in the West, where it was published in early 1983, because the $28 price limits it to mostly students of the Russian language, libraries and professional translators.

Nonetheless, Lady Wilson says her first venture as a lexicographer--the “totally fortuitous” outcome of a casual meeting with a professor at Moscow State University--gave her some fascinating insights into the Soviet people and their language.

Earlier dictionaries were written strictly by Soviets for Soviets and contained “very many ludicrous mistakes,” she said.

“I would not in any way want to disparage Russian scholarship. They’re very thorough, very conscientious and very learned. But, inevitably, they can’t know our language the way we do, and there are some comical mistakes. For instance, one dictionary gave the expression ‘to liquor one’s shoes’ when they meant to ‘polish one’s shoes.’

“There are very few genuine colloquialisms. They like to give proverbs. Their examples tend to be overserious on the productivity of hydroelectric dams or achievements in the cosmos, and my examples are all about practical life. I wanted a household vocabulary, in order to be able to explain myself to a doctor or a garage mechanic, to write a business letter, hopefully to mix with Russians familiarly.

“Until 1970, there was virtually no car vocabulary. You couldn’t find in any dictionary how to dim your headlights, or what the Russian for dipstick was. I think my dictionary was the first to need that word. Of course, when we left in 1971, private cars were only just coming in, but they were rare. They’re much commoner now.”

Lady Wilson studied Latin and Greek at Oxford University and acquired a rudimentary knowledge of Slavic languages while living in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union with her late husband, Sir Duncan Wilson, who was Britain’s envoy to Moscow from 1968 to 1971.

Lady Wilson learned “the nuts and bolts of lexicography”--dictionary writing--by helping a Moscow professor friend, Olga Akhmanova, revise two Russian-English dictionaries in 1947.

She says that although she still speaks Russian poorly, she developed “an instinct for recognizing whether the Russian word is appropriate or not. I am not a Russian scholar, quite emphatically, but I nearly always know what to quarrel with.”

She has warm praise for her Soviet colleagues’ intelligence, kindness, generosity and keen sense of humor. They seem to feel the same way about the British author they affectionately came to know simply as “Betty.”