Yep. Ladies and gentlemen, does Past Perfect imply that an action was completed immediately before a moment in the past?Originally Posted by Pioner
No. Imagine there is a big legendary fish in the lake, nobody can catch it. And one guy says: I am going to catch the bastard (fish).[/quote[quote4zb0v9u]Pranki's variant sounds more exact to me. "Я собираюсь ловить рыбу", etc.
4zb0v9u]
Once again, it's context, context, context. Since there's no simple one to one correspondence between English and Russian tenses, context is vital here.
"Рыбу уже почти поймали", maybe.[/quote[quote4zb0v9u][quote
4zb0v9u]The fish was going to be caught. = рыбу бы поймали (depends on context can be different phrase, nothing comes to my mind right now)
4zb0v9u]
No, translate backwards, and you will get: The fish was almost caught.[/quote4zb0v9u]
Yours would translate back into, "The fish would have been caught". There's just no relevant grammatical pattern in Russian I think.
Besides, back translation is not a way to test validity of a translation. It just doesn't work like maths. Any time you try to cram a text into grammatical and lexical structure of a different language, some shades of meaning are lost, some added, some distorted. Remember "The invisible idiot"?![]()