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 Read more…
Category: Translation trivia
All things Serbian-English translation – translation dilemmas, quandaries and interesting facts about how the Serbian language translates to English.
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 Read more…
Another Serbian word that gives translators endless problems is domaći. The word is from dom – “home” – and is an adjective that, loosely speaking, describes things relating to the home (e.g. every kid’s favourite, domaći zadatak – homework). However Read more…
Ostvarivati prava in Serbian is often translated as ‘realise your rights’. Ugh. In fact, the word ostvariti/ostvarivati poses a frequent problem for translators, loosely meaning ‘to make real’. All too often we see this word translated ‘realise’, and to be Read more…
Do you know your ćevapčići from your ražnjići or your sarma from your kavurma? And if you are familiar with these Serbian specialities, how would you explain them in English? It is no simple matter, and judging by the English Read more…
One translation dilemma that comes up a lot in the Serbian-English translation pair is this expression sugrađani – ‘fellow citizens’. For example, this article on the Subotica.com website (a local news portal for the northern city of Subotica) is headlined: Read more…
Searching for a hair in an egg Like most languages, Serbian has a wealth of idioms and other types of sayings that have arisen over the centuries of the language’s development and are often colourful, pithy and apt. Sometimes they Read more…
