Let’s have some laughs🥳We all know how some translations can be so bad that they’re unintentionally hilarious, like the viral examples from Engrish.com 😂. Well, did you hear about the time in 1996 when the Hungarian tabloid Blikk interviewed Madonna when she was filming Evita in Budapest? Seeing that Madonna doesn’t know Hungarian 🇭🇺 and […]
Working in IT? 👩🏻💻 Would you call yourself an IT-ian, Hitechist or Startupist? These are literal translations of actual terms used to describe people working in IT. In Bosnian 🇧🇦, Croatian 🇭🇷, Montenegrin 🇲🇪 and Serbian 🇷🇸, people working in IT are known as “IT-jevac” (m), “IT-jevka” (f) and “IT-jevci” (p). Of course “IT” is […]
Back from a week researching around Montenegro 🇲🇪, Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦 and Croatia 🇭🇷 with a writer friend of mine. An amazing time! 🚗 ✈️ For anyone working with languages, trips to “territory” (where those languages are spoken) are valuable for language maintenance and seeing and hearing what’s on trend linguistically, particularly slang. There’s […]
Feta, prosecco, parmesan, mozzarella (di bufala campana), champagne…Would you believe that the names of all these famous products are the cause for the deadlock in the free-trade agreement negotiations between the EU 🇪🇺 and Australia 🇦🇺. How come? 👉 All these product names (and more) are protected designation of origin (PDO) terms in the European […]
Watch out for the killer squirrels! 🐿️We’re very much in “silly season” right now in the UK 🤪 Not long ago, a friend posted a link to a news item published the day before about an audacious missionary being killed by the uncontacted people of North Sentinel Islandhttps://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/man-killed-uncontacted-tribe-after-30620890 My immediate thought was “no, not another […]
So who’s having a “crazy coupon” this weekend? 🎉 Wait!✋ A crazy coupon?🎟️😲What’s that? This is the literal translation of the quintessential Bulgarian term “луд купон” (lud kupon). It’s the Bulgarian way of saying “wild party” 🕺🏻🪩💃🏻 So how and when did the Bulgarians decide that a “coupon” also means “party”? Well, no one really […]
Two more language directions have been added to my Institute of Translation and Interpreting profile (check it out here https://www.iti.org.uk/directory/member/mr-nick-nasev.html):⭐ Bosnian to English⭐ Montenegrin to English That brings my total to six 𓃎. Some background… The breakup of Yugoslavia over 30 years ago transformed what was once one language, Serbo-Croatian, into four: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin […]
Surprising as it may be, I was once a child, but one who happened to grow up in a multilingual environment but dominated by English. That I actually ended up having a career using my languages from childhood did not come easily. I had to overcome some major hurdles 🚧 in the form of widely-accepted […]
Did you hear about the man who collects “old-timers”? 👴🏽Or that Frank Sinatra has many “evergreens”? 🌲Or the woman who was a rowing “recorder”? ▶Or how the best player on the field was the “goal man”? 🎯And how one unfortunate person was a victim of “mobbing” in the workplace? 👥 These are all actual examples […]
🟰 Words that look the same or similar in two languages but have two, at times radically, different meanings are called “false friends”. There are plenty of them in most languages, and particularly between Slovenian and the other Southern Slavic languages, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. 💁🏻 A particular false friend I love […]
