Like a lot of former “Communist bloc” countries, Serbia is rather prone to excessively bureaucratic or flowery turns of phrase where they aren’t necessary (are they ever necessary?).
In English it’s become something of a joke – for example people have long enjoyed playing with job titles. Can you guess any of these?
- Environmental maintenance officer
- Media publications administrator
- Refreshments and nutritions supervisor
- Revenue protection officer
They are, in order: a street cleaner, a paperboy, a canteen cook and a ticket collector.
But this kind of unnecessarily inflated description is done in Serbia all the time. Just the other day we translated a report from an NGO that described someone’s occupation as: vrši uslugu uređivanja zelenih površina –“conducting services in maintaining green surfaces”.
But is it really necessary to describe someone’s job in such ornate terms? Without wishing to denigrate anyone’s occupation (the project the NGO is involved in is a really good one, promoting self-employment as a way out of poverty for vulnerable groups such as Roma people), green surfaces are gardens and lawns – the guy basically mows lawns, digs gardens and pulls weeds. We are pretty sure the word for that in English is “gardener”, and that’s how we translated it. Sometimes you just have to cut through the bureaucratese when you are translating because to try to translate a phrase like that in a literal way means to add a layer of obfuscation that effectively doesn’t “translate” the phrase at all.
It’s not just job descriptions, Serbian is in love with a great many phrases that we have difficulty translating into English but seem to be firmly entrenched and we can’t just skip over them.
Here are a few more which perhaps we will look at individually in future articles:
- rešiti stambeno pitanje – lit. ‘to resolve your housing issues’. The phrase is a standard one meaning to secure/arrange permanent (and legal/long-term, appropriate) accommodation or housing for yourself/someone. It’s actually very commonly used and might informally be translated “get a roof over your head”. For example rešiti stambeno pitanje for refugees would mean finding them a permanent or long-term solution in regard to housing, especially if they were living long-term in unsuitable or legally problematic housing. But people say it informally too – “I bought an apartment, I’ve finally ‘resolved my housing issues'”. Very tricky in English and there is no single way to translate it, and so common in Serbian, despite its bureaucratic origins, that it won’t be going anywhere any time soon.
- ostvariti svoja prava – lit. “to realise/exercise/pursue your rights”. Not unusual-sounding in English, but very vague, what does that specifically mean? It could be used in many contexts in Serbian but usually it relates to “getting something done” and securing some statutory right, say, securing an invalidity pension or some other benefits from the government. You’d think that wouldn’t require a special phrase, you just go and do it, right? But remember, in a bureaucratic society, securing even your basic rights can very often require a lot of red tape and even greasing the right wheels. In English we might prefer to simply state what specific “right” it was you “exercised” – “I got my pension sorted out today”! By the way, we have a separate article about this specific phrase – ostvari(va)ti prava, which has some additional thoughts on this.
- vršiti nezakonite radnje – lit. ‘to conduct unlawful acts’. It just means to commit a crime, but the media, police and criminal justice systems for some reason like to make it sound more impressive than it was!
There are many, many such examples, and the point we really want to make here is about translation. When translating from Serbian to English the translator needs to make a decision – is there anything to be gained from attempting to translate such phrases “literally”. Indeed, can it even be considered a “translation” if the reader of the target text is none the wiser as to the meaning?
Of course, there are many examples of bureaucratese in English too, and the modern science of management has been a particularly rich source of such phraseology, but the UK seems to have never had quite the affinity for it that the former Communist countries have. The Plain English Campaign has likely played an important role too.
But at Odista, as translators working primarily from Serbian to English, we are in the business of conveying meaning, and we are committed to communicating not to word-for-word literal sense – which very often makes no sense at all – but the plain, understandable language which strives to communicate the intention behind the source text so that your reader is left in no doubt as to what you meant to say.
