Serbian - Croatian

The Serbian-Croatian, on translations and other things.

by D. Djordjević

Over the years I've done the translator, working occasionally with the agencies. It was mostly of documents of various kinds, manuals or business letters. Came in handy to cover the holes or to keep you occupied when you are out of work, even if the money earned were always a few. Was more challenging when I did voluntarily as for example for the transmission Ostavka! Radio Shockwave Severgnini conducted by Michelangelo between 1999 and 2001, or by doing interpretere to Aleksandar Zograf when he came to present its collection of comics in Milan also in those years. Some experiments were also depressing as when I acted as interpreter in a court during the summary trial to two Roma accused of attempted theft. They were sentenced to several months in prison without stealing anything. Under the table one of the two caused me to pass a note with the phone number of a relative in Germany and a calling card. The first attempt did not succeed because a guard saw it, but by the second hearing ended when everyone stood up finally handed it to me. I called immediately and I felt a little 'redeemed for working with a process that I found embarrassing. Lately, given the economic difficulties I started again to send their CVs to translation agencies and some responded. One of these, Easy Languages, a kind of selection called an article on the languages ​​and the translation profession, to be eligible for the team of collaborators. I wrote on the age issue for a language that everyone speaks in four of the six former Yugoslav republics, but no one recognizes, that the Serb-Croat.


Serbian-Croatian, when a language becomes uncomfortable.

When I was born in 1977 in Yugoslavia spoke Serbian-Croatian, the language considered three official languages used in the individual federal republics: Slovenia, Macedonia and Albania. To these we can add the spoken language minorities in border areas such as Hungarian, Italian, Wallachian, and the languages spoken by the Roma community and goranci. Of course there were the local dialects, much less numerous than in Italy but also marked differences, that in the course of the twentieth century have been standardized and replaced by spoken regional differed mostly for accent and slang. The linguistic situation may seem complicated but in the end has never been a problem, because the majority of the population spoke precisely the Serb-Croat. language "unifying", while other languages, however, had their own spaces in schools, media and publishing. Then the rise of the current hegemonic policies or disgregazioniste passed away this peculiar linguistic plurality and intercomprensibilità.

If anything, it is today that confusion reigns as the Serbian-Croatian, spoken in Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia was divided into Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, without a reasonable basis for linguistic-philological but mainly on political base. So in the languages ​​of the former Yugoslavia would be doubled if a resident can go to Sarajevo and Podgorica have a conversation of any meeting at most a few dozen different terms, however, known not only to those who were born before eighties. The same applies if a resident of Zagreb goes to Belgrade, where the most will find some difficulty if he goes in the suburbs where they speak a particular slang formed in recent decades, but the same difficulties that could find a Milanese wandering through the villages of Rome. So now you can run into the paradox of having to translate a text from Serbia to Montenegro, which are among the other two variants closer to Serbian-Croatian considering the historical and cultural factors that have woven the story of the two countries. In fact the last separation concerns precisely these two republics, fortunately without tragic results occurred and bloody as those that characterized the civil war of the nineties, but still quite heavy with consequences at the political level and, consequently, social and economic, creating several problems for ordinary citizens, accustomed to travel, to do business, entertain family relationships and friendships, being suddenly faced with new boundaries and bureaucratic obstacles. In the light of this situation, as I mentioned, we see emerging in the linguistic speculations. To take a trivial example, but significant, if we look at the labels of any product, we have to read the ingredients in four different languages where differences often do not exist or were minimal. In misguided attempt to highlight the diversity using synonyms or simply changing a preposition. For anyone and especially for a professional translator can be a bit 'scandalous that someone is paid to pretend to translate.

Without being of philologists, but using only common sense, we can not conclude whether it is the exact same language, at least have the very strong doubts that we can break up under the new political and administrative borders. Yet today, the Serbian-Croatian is not even discussed, pretending it does not exist even if the attempts to turn it into neo-lingual accentuating the differences and pointing to the overproduction of neologisms sometimes ridiculous, are not having the desired success. A language follows its own course and adapts to the needs of human nature is obviously much more practical and longest-running current policy that would live or dead.

I would like to suggest websites where you can learn Serbian, learn Croatian or learn Bosnian online with native teachers.