This is probably another losing battle, but due no doubt to lazy translation from English into Serbian the English borrowing dizajniran is increasingly being used in Serbian where it is quite unnecessary. The word dizajn (“design”), since it made its way into Serbian, probably some decades ago, has always primarily referred to visual or graphical design. The emphasis is on the visual/aesthetic type of design.
In recent years however, the English word “design/designed” is increasingly being used in Serbian to mean the manufacture of a product, process or anything else along those lines, not just in the visual sense but in terms of all its characteristics taken as a whole. This usage is especially prevalent in advertising (an industry which is notoriously sloppy when it comes to translating advertising slogans wholesale, as we have lamented many times before).
For example, “pogledajte kako izgleda rover koji je dizajniran da se vozi po Marsu” (“check out the new rover which has been designed to be driven on Mars“). Here, dizajniran is really an alien (pun not intended) usage of this word in Serbian. It sounds as though it is referring to the visual design of the rover, but of course it’s not, it’s talking about everything – the mechanics, the electronics etc. etc.
We don’t recommend this usage of dizajniran and would never use it like that in any of our English-Serbian translations. A better alternative in this case might be projektovan, which is used very often when talking about industrial, engineering and those kinds of design.
Other words you could use for “designed” in Serbian might be osmišljen (something like “devised, thought out”), koncipiran (“conceived of” or “intended for use [in such-and-such a way]”) or maybe simply napravljen, proizveden [tako da] (“made, produced/manufactured [in such a way as to…]”.
Yes, we realise projektovan is not a Serbian word in origin, and nor is koncipiran, and we recognise that these processes of assimilating foreign words are probably inevitable. But a hallmark of good-quality writing is aiming to NOT jump on the bandwagon with new words before they are well and truly adopted, and always favouring older more established words. This takes more effort than lazily borrowing the word from the foreign language. This is another way we ensure a high standard of production in Serbian (or English) in our translation work.
