разбить ... так, чтобы ... как можно лучше совпали

18:54 Nov 22, 2010 

Do you remember how much you have written to defend your "Givens triangularization" against my "Givens rotation" when вращение was in the context? - I very well do

What's more, if you weren't advised by Rachel on "closely," I bet you'd be defending the 'well' in "as well as possible" as fiercely as you are defending your wordy "in such a way so as to", with lots of googled examples at hand. Why don't you ask for her advice on this one?

Finally, here is a good criterion for optimal Russian<->English translation quality that I've derived from my vast experience:
The English/Russian character count ratio (including spaces) should be around 5/6
If the ratio exceeds 1/1, don't hesitate to look for redundant words, and you'll surely find them. After you delete them, your translation will be much easier readable

18:01 Nov 22, 2010 

In the same situation, you would choose the shortest translation. Both approaches have their merits; why don't you let Asker decide what he feels is best here instead of criticizing other answers (note that yours has not been criticized by anyone here)?

Finally, "совпадать" in Russian has the connotation of chance in one of its meanings, but not all of them, according to "Толковый словарь русского языка под редакцией Т. Ф. Ефремовой": http://www.slovopedia.com/15/209/1586858.html and "Толковый словарь Ожегова и Шведовой": http://www.slovopedia.com/4/209/673063.html and "Толковый словарь Ушакова": http://www.slovopedia.com/3/209/837750.html These definitions also show that "совпадать частично" is perfectly valid. The meaning of the word must have simply expanded with time. And if some Russian authors use "совпадать" in a distorted way, the author of the sentence we are translating does not have to be one of them. Most importantly, what about all those native speakers on Google Scholar using "coincide as closely/well as possible" in the exact sciences - do they all also distort the meaning of the English word "coincide"?

17:48 Nov 22, 2010 

"mere word-by-word translation", ""in such a way" is a typical калька с русского", "native Russian speaker who can't stop thinking in Russian while writing in English", etc., are disparaging and not true. Next time, I will have to ask the moderators to interfere.

As to your comments, "in such a way that/so as to" meaning "таким образом, чтобы" appears in millions of Google results: http://www.google.com/search?q="in such a way so as to&... Same with Google Scholar (up to the maximum number of results that it finds). Do you suggest these are all "кальки с русского"? Next, perhaps my experience is unimpressive compared to your vast one, but I have been in translation and interpretation for many years and having studied (for my Bachelor's and Ph. D.), done research and lived in the US for seven years, I am quite capable of thinking and writing in English and understanding what is foreign to English, what is a literal translation and what is not. Third, given a choice of several correct translations (and I would never treat a strange-sounding translation as correct), I would choose the one with the wording and style most closely resembling those of the source.

20:10 Nov 21, 2010 

looks more like a mere word-by-word translation ("in such a way" is a typical калька с русского - will you please ask Rachel Douglas about it?). Translations of this kind usually come to the mind of a native Russian speaker who can't stop thinking in Russian while writing in English
As for совпадать, my vast experience in translating scientific, engineering, and other technical documents has made it clear to me that Russian authors tend to use this verb instead of, say, равняться even if the meaning is distorted. Classical examples include frequently encountered phrases where A is said to "coincide" with B when A = B is actually the result stated by a theorem. Why should this be veiwed as a distortion? Because the verb совпадать has a connotation of chance (as does its equivalent "coincide"), whereas an equality that is proved by logical reasoning cannot be just coincidental, and should by no means be referred to as such
In summary, being "true to source" may not prevent a translation from sounding odd to an English-speaking ear

18:21 Nov 21, 2010 

First of all, doubts on whether "coincide..." is a valid translation in principle were raised here; in fact, this whole Discussion thread started with a question: can "coincide" mean not a perfect/full match? Second, you yourself said in your answer text that using "coincide..." in the exact sciences is "thuzzy finking" and in this Discussion that a translation based on "coincide..." is not written well-enough. Hopefully, with the support of my answer here and hundreds of research papers from the exact sciences, many by native speakers, at my Google Scholar link, I have demonstrated that the thinking is not fuzzy. Finally, if you have issues with "coincide..." in this context, they should really be directed at the source text, because there is no difference between "coincide as closely/well as possible" and "совпадать как можно лучше" indeed, so if you are unhappy with the former, the same must be the case for the latter and then you have to edit the source text. I saw my task as the closest correct translation of the source while preserving its style, hence the choice of "coincide". Same goes for "in such a way" for "таким образом" - longer than "so that", but true to source, etc.

20:01 Nov 19, 2010 

but why so many words with the sole purpose: to argue that "coincide as well as possible" is valid while nobody doubts that?

Here's another idea for a prolific writer:
"coincide as closely as possible"
can be replaced with
"as close as possible"
by slightly changing the phrasing

Thus, instead of an undoubtedly(!) valid but a bit too long (and just a little little bit oxymoronic) one, we'll have one that perfectly translates the meaning without being wordy (which is a big deal, because wordiness generally makes both reading and understanding more difficult and tiring)

18:04 Nov 19, 2010 

It is certainly up to the Asker what translation (if any) to choose. But the use of "coincide" outside of the perfect match meaning is valid indeed: Rachel Douglas, a native speaker, has chosen to agree with my translation and in her comment below suggested only that "closely" be used instead of "well". I gratefully acknowledge that this is indeed a better and much more common option in scientific writing: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?start=0&q="coincide as clo... As hundreds of citations at this link demonstrate, plenty of other native speakers from a variety of the sciences, including physics, biology, statistics, and engineering, have also chosen this formulation.

12:40 Nov 19, 2010 

All this discussion reminds me of the Middle Ages theological discussion about how many angels can fit on a pinhead in that respect that as no-one actually saw any angels so we don't exactly know what type of a process we have here. Aren't we supposed to translate the meaning and not just simply the text? Perhaps a detailed description of the process in Russian might help describe the requirements to it in English?

12:19 Nov 19, 2010 

Let me just note that
"coincide as well as possible"
or
"best matched"
can't be viewed as written well enough, if only for the sole reason that
coincide = correspond exactly; be identical
match = be exactly like; correspond exactly
(various dictionaries)
whereas approximate rather than exact correspondence is explicitly stated here, which makes these wordings sound a bit oxymoronic

11:39 Nov 19, 2010 

I personally liked the choice of nouns and your question is not about nouns. :)

As for the choice of verbs, I still like "be as close as possible" of Andrei B's answer and "time differences are minimized" of, well, mine better. Seems like you can take nouns from the cited passage and the verbs from a cited answer and have the best of both worlds. :)

"coincide as well as possible" somehow feels baroque. Not my cup of tea.

11:39 Nov 19, 2010 

I think this title is pretty close to yours, but there are still differences and a mistake in grammar, I believe: it should be "coincideD" or "would coincide". As to the differences, they're minor, but still: they talk about time intervals, your text deals with stages and time moments, etc. Beyond those issues, it is up to your personal taste. Some participants here, I guess, would not agree with this title for the same reasons they do not agree with mine. For the record, when I said that the text seemed well-written, I meant the text, not the title. In the title, the interest was in "coincide as well as possible" as relevant to our discussion.

11:13 Nov 19, 2010 

Do you really think "we divide the loading period into small time intervals so that the interval ends coincide as well as possible with the onsets of unloading" is well-written? Then I can just copy-paste it with minor alterations

09:17 Nov 19, 2010 

A few points in response to yours:

1) As I said in this discussion, quantification would be an issue with any verb used, including minimize (your version), i.e., just how good/close should this minimization be, simply because all that the source gives us is 'как можно лучше совпали'.

2) I just gave Harvard (BTW, Harvard is misspelled in your link #1) and NASA as examples of institutions and said so; there are plenty of other academic papers with "coincide as well as possible" as your link #3 demonstrates.

3) Naturally, with "as well as possible" being much stronger qualification than "well", fewer hits are to be expected with the former.

4) Thanks a lot for the "we divide the loading period into small time intervals so that the interval ends coincide as well as possible with the onsets of unloading" reference. It does seem pretty close to the Asker's question and the text well-written.

09:05 Nov 19, 2010 

There are other words used like that. Take "fit" for example. One could argue that somethng either fits or not. Boolean value so to say. Yet, we talk all the time about a "good/perfect/better/best fit".

08:44 Nov 19, 2010 

We agreed that strictly speaking "coincide well" should be quantified and "coincide as well as possible" just doesn't look like the best way to quantify.

In general, 12 hits for Harvard [1] and 15 hits for NASA [2] just don't look convincing to me on the background of a total of 525 hits, give or take.

As for "another example", for pure fun of it, I'd postulate that Google search for "verb + well" yields much lower number of hits than "verb + as well as possible" as e.g. in [4]. This hardly proves anything, does it not? :)

This being said, "we divide the loading period into small time intervals so that the interval ends coincide as well as possible with the onsets of unloading" found among the results of Google Scholar search for "coincide as well as possible" [3] looks pretty close to what the original says.

[1] http://goo.gl/9FQxj
[2] http://goo.gl/sTxUj
[3] http://goo.gl/mn1c7
[4] "agree well" — http://goo.gl/y7Gdb vs. "agree as well as possible" — http://goo.gl/XwxQJ

08:22 Nov 19, 2010 

Concerning "coincide as well as possible": Google finds 532 instances of it: http://www.google.com/search?q="coincide as well as pos... Most of these hits are from research papers/reports and other academic works in a variety of technical fields, including physics, computer science, medical imaging, astronomy, and engineering. Plenty of the authors are native speakers. The institutions include, for example, Harvard and NASA.

07:53 Nov 19, 2010 

Why? If "coincide well" is acceptable according to your own words, I see no reason why "as well as possible" would not be in the same context. In Russian (source text included) it works in the same way, and we are trying to preserve the style, without using constructions foreign to English of course. Can you explain your position and also give another example of a verb that can be used with "well", but not with "as well as possible"?

20:03 Nov 18, 2010 

"coincide as well as possible" is beyond the scope of acceptability inherent to "coincide well".

19:59 Nov 18, 2010 

Good points, and a good example!

19:56 Nov 18, 2010 

I actually agree with you that, say, "correspond" is generally better in other contexts. But in this specific context of time moments and given the Russian source, I think "coincide" works better. Strictly speaking, "well" must be quantified - I agree with that as well - but that would be a common issue with any of the alternative words, too.

19:53 Nov 18, 2010 

In a similar way - do they always coincide, sometimes, rarely? The degree of trust we can put in that.

19:51 Nov 18, 2010 

When you say two things coincide (in time say) one can always ask - how well? Meaning that being on the same day is enough to say two DOBs coincide but not enough for flight departues times for instance.

So you can speak of how well two things coincide - with an implication of: is it well enough for something or other?

19:45 Nov 18, 2010 

Yes and no: both are is use and both are awkward; correspond, correlate, match and their Russian counterparts generally do a better job.

However, "coincide well" can be tolerable provided that the author makes sure to specify numerically just how well things coincide.

19:32 Nov 18, 2010 

Exactly my point! But you seemed to disagree in your previous discussion post?

19:29 Nov 18, 2010 

"сoincide well" is to English what "хорошо совпадать" is to Russian.

19:24 Nov 18, 2010 

is something that google finds more than 60,000 of. Here is one example produced by a native speaker in a research article in a high-ranking journal: http://www.pnas.org/content/77/8/4643.full.pdf To coincide well means to be almost the same, just like in Russian. In general, coincide is especially appropriate for moments of time, as in this context by Asker.

19:02 Nov 18, 2010 

For the purposes of this definition — http://www.thefreedictionary.com/coincide — I think you are.

18:58 Nov 18, 2010 

Coincidence means exact match. Things cannot coincide better or worse. They either coincide or not. Am I right?