engru.narod.ru was the website of a translator offering professional English-Russian translation services in Nizhny Novgorod[1], listed in the nn.ru directory under the /rub/ section[1]. The site was hosted on the free hosting service Narod.ru and existed from 2002 to 2005[1][2].

What the site looked like and what it offered

The home page was divided into menu sections: "Home", "Fields of Expertise", "Qualifications", "Projects", "Customers", "Rates", "Contacts" and "Online Translators" — with separate entries for Russian, German, French and Spanish[1]. The page featured an email input form under the heading "Need my sample translation?" — an offer to send a sample translation[1].

As the home page stated, the author offered "impeccable, efficient and culturally correct translation into Russian," positioning herself as an alternative to "extremely high agency rates"[1]. It claimed more than 11 years of experience translating in the fields of business, medicine, the automotive industry, mechanical engineering, education, ecology, and the gas and oil industry[1], as well as a guarantee of fast order fulfillment and electronic delivery of the finished text in the client's chosen format[1].

The list of working languages on the page was long: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Yiddish — with a split between "into English" and "from English" directions[1]. At the bottom of the page was a copyright notice: "© Ectaco, Inc. Electronic Dictionary, 2002, Natalia Baryshnikova" — meaning the site's author was listed as translator Natalia Baryshnikova, with the mentioned Ectaco electronic dictionary cited as a tool used[1]. In the 2005 snapshot the same notice remained almost unchanged, with only the copyright year changed to 2003[2] — the site's text had barely been updated in the intervening years.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site was recorded by the census in the nn.ru directory, in the /rub/ section, described as a professional translation service in Nizhny Novgorod[1]. No data on the site's standing in the Counter.nn.ru rating or on votes as part of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day has been found in the surviving samples — this indicates the site's absence from the collected data, not a zero result within it. For more on how such a sample is compiled and what a site's absence from it means, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, devoted to the history of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of the early 2000s.

How it closed

The earliest home page snapshot preserved in the web archive is dated December 14, 2002[1], and another snapshot with the same text is dated January 31, 2005[2]. The last snapshot in the web archive is dated March 7, 2005. The material contains no data on the domain being moved to another address; the site is considered closed.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)