Odista is a translation agency solely dedicated to translations in the Serbian-English pair, although we also take on translations into English from some of the other ‘former Yugoslav languages’. So where does Serbian fit in with these other languages and what are its unique features?
Where Serbian fits in
Serbian is a South-Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, now an independent Republic, formerly part of Yugoslavia before its breakup. The South Slavic language group also includes Slovene, Macedonian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian.
The languages of the South Slavic group share a high degree of similarity with each other (more than, say, with Russian or Polish), and their speakers can understand one another to a certain degree. In particular, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Bosnian would probably be considered variants or dialects of the same language (and have been historically, under the label of Serbo-Croat, a term which is no longer used). However, especially since the break-up of the former Yugoslavia, it has proven hard to discuss this subject without igniting passions on all sides and so we will not get into that here. Suffice it to say that speakers of these four languages can completely understand one another and there are few professionals working in Serbian-English translation who would not work in all four of these languages (us at Odista included), at least when translating into English. However, when translating into Croatian, Serbian or one of the other former Yugoslav languages, a native of those languages must be employed to assure the unique characteristics of the language in question. A Serbian text in Croatia just will not do, and not only for the political reasons alluded to earlier.
In fact the South Slavic languages are an example of an interesting phenomenon called a language continuum, where in truth there is no clearly defined boundary between these languages – rather, as one travels across the region where they are spoken there is a gradual transition from one spoken form to the other. This is particularly true of the former “Serbo-Croat” languages, but also, to an extent, of Bulgarian and Macedonian, which transition into Serbian via intermediate dialects spoken in those southern areas (which are known as Torlakian dialects), and Slovene, which is very similar to a Croatian dialect called Kajkavian spoken in an area of Croatia that borders with Slovenia.
All of the South Slavic dialects and languages belong to the wider Slavic group which includes Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian (East Slavic languages) and Czech, Slovak and Polish (West Slavic languages). There is no category of North Slavic languages, although this term is sometimes used when considering the East and West groups together.
What Serbian looks like
Serbian is written phonetically – this means that spelling rules are (almost) entirely predictable. As long as you know the pronunciation of a single letter, you can generally know how a word is pronounced since the sounds of letters rarely change, regardless of the word they are used in or the position they occupy in relation to other letters. That does make it a lot easier to read Serbian because you can literally string the letters together and pronounce the word accurately.
On the other hand, Serbian also traditionally uses the Cyrillic script, which can be a stumbling block for foreigners wanting to learn the language or to find their way around when visiting. Cyrillic is familiar to most people since Russian is written exclusively in Cyrillic script. Serbian uses its own unique version of Cyrillic, with some letters which are not found in Russian (or any other Slavic language) and vice-versa. Despite Cyrillic being the “official” alphabet, a slightly modified Serbian Latin script (including letters č, ć, š, đ etc.) is also officially recognised and very widely used and indeed is seen as a serious threat to the survival of the Cyrillic script by many. Still, anyone learning Serbian needs to get to grips with Cyrillic too as they will encounter it very frequently.
The Serbian language can be perceived as quite difficult by English speakers trying to learn it. Probably the main reason for this is that Serbian, like most of the Slavic languages, is a highly inflected or fusional language. This basically means that words are subject to many different changes, depending on their relation to other words, their gender, whether they are repeated or single actions and many other finesses that English speakers find hard to grasp. The classic example of this is the the case system, or system of declension. Declension hardly exists in English any more, though will be familiar to anyone who learned Latin or Greek. It means that nouns change form depending on their relationship to the subject of the sentence.
So crvena knjiga is red book. But I saw the red book is video sam crvenu knjigu – this is known as the accusative case and denotes a direct object, just as in English we would say “He is tall”, but “I saw him” (not, “I saw HE”!) Only, in English, these are just remnants. In Serbian we have seven of these cases, all fully operational, and which have to be learned across all four genders, and the contexts in which they are used has to be learned too, of course. And adjectives have to match the noun in case too (hence crvenU knjigU). Yes, this is rather difficult, but on the other hand, there ARE rules that can be learned and there are not a huge number of exceptions or irregularities. There is a certain musicality in the language as a result, which some find intuitive. Many English speakers have learned to speak Serbian fluently – you can too!
Translation between Serbian and English
So what are the special considerations when translating to and from Serbian? There are many that are true of all translation work, but there are some aspects we pay particular attention to. We would love to give some examples, but this article would get very long! However in general, Serbian, like a lot of languages in the region, can be overly fond of excessively formal and bureaucratic language, even where the context really does not require it. When this is translated into English it can seem very stilted and unnatural.
Our job is often to unpick the meaning and try to render the English in a more natural and authentically English way, especially where a text is intended to be read by the general public, by customers, etc.
This sometimes requires considerable licence with the translation and we will often consult with the client before going ahead with a more relaxed, dynamic approach, to make sure they understand why we are doing this.
Being a Slavic language and perhaps further removed in some ways from English than French or German are, there are frequent turns of phrase in Serbian that simply do not translate to English in a straightforward way. Idioms can differ significantly, and even everyday concepts can require some serious thought in order to render them in natural English. There are MANY examples of this, where we simply cannot follow the Serbian turn of phrase closely, yet unfortunately we frequently see translations into English where this has been done.
These may seem like minor details, but this attention to detail and to the spirit of the target language is what sets apart a good translation from a bad one, a translation that is indistinguishable from a text originally written in English from one which clearly ‘feels’ like a translation (sometimes disastrously so).
One thing we are very mindful of when translating into Serbian is the undue influence of English on the Serbian language. A great deal of ‘translation’ today is done informally by journalists and many other non-linguists with the result that a great deal of unnecessary and unwieldy anglicisms enter common parlance in Serbian without passing any critical consideration. Although this is ultimately a natural process and cannot realistically be fought, we believe that the Serbian translations we produce should reflect a high-quality literary standard of Serbian that relies on the wealth of existing Serbian vocabulary rather than arbitrary loan words, which often betray a paucity of knowledge of the language. Of course, there are countless well-established anglicisms in Serbian too, and we do not shy away from them entirely but we can do our bit to preserve an authentic Serbian turn of phrase which ultimately communicates the message far more naturally to a native Serbian speaker.
We hope you learned something about the Serbian language and how we approach translation. Odista is standing by for all your Serbian-English translation needs!
