Serbian translators left jobless!
During his recent visit to Belgrade, Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader announced that Croatia would offer Serbia hundreds of documents connected with the European Union integration process which have already been translated into Croatian at a cost of almost one million euros. The idea behind it is that Serbia will save a significant sum of money as Serbian translation of these documents will not be necessary (Croatian and Serbian are essentially dialects of the same language).
Serbian translators and translation companies might well be peeved with Mr Sanader for snatching away their slice of this million-euro chunk of their bread and butter!
On the other hand, perhaps he has done us a favour in certain respects – the material in question is for the most part of the less-than-wildly-exciting legal type, whose translation into Serbian would require much laborious and, some might even say, boring work, though we are aware that this is a matter of preference!
Besides this, these documents are a mere drop in the ocean compared to the volume of materials which will still need to be translated into Serbian as part of the European integration process – in other words, there will be plenty more work where that came from!
But there is another aspect of this story which may be cause for concern: as a translation company we are the last people who would overemphasise the differences between the Croatian and Serbian languages. However, in the essential task of adapting the Croatian material to the Serbian language (we can only speak of a “translation” in the loosest possible sense) there is a danger that the task will be taken too lightly. We may see the kind of lapses we occasionally see with Croatian, Slovene and other former Yugoslav companies in the Serbian market: kitchen units which are “žute boje, brez sanitarne armature” (“brez” – from Slovene – instead of “bez”); „želja nam je zadržati tržišni primat” (frequent use of the infinitive in a way far more typical for Croatian than Serbian); “posle uporabe kesicu zatvorite” – probably a mistake by a Croatian translator, since the word “*uporaba” (“use”) is not used in Serbian, but rather “upotreba”.
To be fair, we have singled out some particularly glaring examples here. However, there is still a very real risk that this adaptation process may be approached with the attitude that the Croatian text only need be “tweaked” a little in order for it to become Serbian, instead of being fundamentally rewritten in the spirit of the Serbian language. This risk is present, not despite the great similarity between Croatian and Serbian, but because of it.
That is why we expect that the Serbian EU Integration Office will have taken this news with a pinch of salt. Perhaps our fears will prove unfounded, but the fact remains: a high-quality, exhaustive adaptation of the texts which Mr Sanader has presented to Serbia, ensuring careful comparison with the source texts in English or other languages, and with full terminological harmonisation with the Serbian language, is a task not to be underestimated. This adaptation, by our reckoning, according to market pricing, could cost as much as 30-50% of the total value of the translations carried out so far. But if the generosity of Croatia is to serve any purpose, this process is essential, so that this gesture will not turn into something more closely resembling a disservice and so that we do not end up with yet another translation into Serbian which has not been carried out, as we like to say, “all the way”.
