quote:"kto, kogo", "who? whom?"
This should be translated as
Cé bhuach? or (when embedded also) Cé bhuachfas?
This very common expression can make a sentence of its own (Кто кого?) or get embedded as in Посмотрим кто кого. The closest English equivalent is something with the Object wh-phrase in situ: Who has beaten whom? or Who will defeat whom? With the finite-verb phrase ellipsed, the temporal information is recovered from the context. This expression presupposes familiarity with the situation and the competing parties. Clearly, if one finds out who the winner is, they can infer who has lost. So, there really is no point in getting both question words translated (cé tá thuas is cé tá thios?) and so I argue that the more concise 'cé tá thuas?' is good enough.
There is a bunch of similar expressions in Russian actually, e.g. кому что or кому как, meaning 'to each his own'. The last one appears in a Runglish joke about translation department graduates as 'for whom how' :)
(Message edited by peter on December 04, 2010)