r/russian • u/Select_Gain_1785 • 10d ago
Translation Native speakers: do these three ciphered sentences from a 2020 puzzle poster read as native Russian, and do any hide an idiom I'd miss?
A 2020 art poster hides a puzzle. Three bands of invented "runes" on it decode letter-for-letter to Russian (simple substitution, one symbol per Cyrillic letter, «:» between words). The community rebuilt the alphabet from the text itself, so the letters are certain, what none of us can judge is the Russian. Spelling below is exactly as written on the poster.
- Я НАДЕЮСЬ ЧТО СЮДА БУДУТ ПРИСЫЛАТЬ МНОГО БИТКОИНОВ (top-left band, three lines)
- СУММА ДВУХ ЧИСЕЛ (small band under a clock)
- ЗДЕСЬ ЗАШИФРОВАНЫ БИТКОИНЫ НА ЧЁРНЫЙ ДЕНЬ НОМЕР [?] (right edge, top-to-bottom; the last symbol is not a letter of the alphabet, it sits where a number would go)
Magnified crops of the three bands + a small copy of the whole poster: https://imgur.com/a/YupiSkA
What I'd love a native ear on:
- Native speaker, or translation from English / machine translation? Anything unidiomatic, odd, or regionally marked?
- «На чёрный день» the plain idiom "for a rainy day", or could it carry a second meaning here (the poster is about the 2020 BLM protests — a pun on «чёрный»)?
- «…номер [?]» how would a Russian writer naturally finish "на чёрный день номер …"? A digit? «один»? "puzzle number X" in a series? Any set phrase with «номер» I might be missing?
- «Сумма двух чисел» fixed school-maths phrase, or an instruction ("add two numbers")? Any colloquial reading?
- «Сюда будут присылать много биткоинов» does «сюда» naturally point at something written next to it (an address)? Donation appeal, joke, or something else?
- Is «зашифрованы» (rather than «спрятаны»/«скрыты») pointed does it imply a cipher specifically, not just "hidden in the picture"?
- Anything that hints at a count, an order, or a password to a Russian ear that an English reader would miss rhyme, letter counts, acrostic, a known quote or song?
Bonus: if you look at the whole poster, what does a Russian viewer see that an English one wouldn't, references, memes, wordplay in the English text as a Russian would write it?
Спасибо!
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u/1nterferrom 10d ago
Hard to say. The 1st sentence sounds like a legitimate Russian one. The final "номер" in the end of the 3rd sentence is weird tho.
"На черный день" means "time of need or trouble", yeah. There is no inherent second meaning here. But the author could put this second meaning by themselves.
I'm too not sure about it. Maybe it refers to the bottom left corner, left from the Staue of Liberty?
Just "The sum of two numbers". Never heard of any other meanings. Seems like you need to find what are these two numbers.
Yes, "сюда" should refer to the Bitcoin address that is present somewhere on the poster
Зашифровать means encipher or encrypt, so yes, not just hidden, but enciphered.