Wanted: Proofreader who speaks Croatian (preferably native)

Okay, send your smartass translator to Hamilton, just south of Glasgow. Glesga is a breeze. Hamilton? Or rather, Ahmull'un. I guarantee she will meet her match! Oh, and they say 'how?' when they mean 'why?' as well. Fun.

 

A fellow forum member (who shall remain nameless) who is Hungarian helped me sort out the few passages I needed to include in my novel. Totally grateful.

 

If anyone needs a hookup for Italian translation, I have an amazing native speaker resource who I met when she asked is she could translate one of my fanfics into Italian. She would then translate the reviews left on the fic and send them over to me. I also have a good friend who grew up in France and then moved to Quebec, who's been a big help with French translation for me as well.

 

I'm from Croatia. If you still need help, I'll be glad to help you out.

Btw, to clear the air.
Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro. These countries speak very similar language and have no trouble understanding each other.
All the others, no. Sure, Croatian and Russian both have complex grammar and share few words with each other but that's it. So, except for few random words, there is no way I could understand Russian.

 

Thank you. What I have, updated from what @matwoolf provided earlier, is the following:

“Kojim putem do Pule?” asked Marko. The man stared back quizzically. “Da li je ovo put do Pule?” Marko tried.

“Stranci?” asked the man.

Marko looked at Celeste, then back to the man. “Da.”

The man looked back and forth between the two travelers, peering at them suspiciously in the darkness with particular focus on Celeste, pointed down a road and said, “Onom cestom, a zatim skrenite desno” before disappearing into the night.

“What was all of that?” Celeste asked.

“I asked him for directions to Pula. He wanted to know if we were foreigners, and I told him we were. That seemed the best explanation. He said to go down this road and turn right. He wasn’t more specific; I hope there’s a sign.”
​

Later in the same passage I have this (is 'Croat' appropriately used here?):

“Look,” said Marko, pointing across the street. A sign on one of the buildings read Sobe, Camere, Zimmer. “They have rooms for rent. Isn’t camere the word for ‘rooms’ in Italian? Sobe is Croat.”

“It is. And I think the other word is German, though I’m not sure.”

Marko looked at the building. Three stories tall, it had large windows evenly spaced across the front on the first and second floors. The ground floor had a medium-sized door and two smaller windows with iron-bound shutters; the plaster and stonework were well maintained, and the upper stories were painted a ruddy earth color in contrast to the buildings to the left and right of it, which looked blue or gray in the low light. “It looks reasonably safe. And, as they say, tko ne vaze, nema blaga.”

“And that means…?”

“‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained.’ Let’s go.”
​

In the following chapter, I have this little tidbit; a single word:

After the man left, Marko stood and examined Celeste’s new set of clothes. He nodded approvingly and smiled at Petra. “Dobro,” he said. It was one of about four Croatian words that Celeste knew, and meant ‘good’. Petra beamed.
​

After establishing the language differences, I switched to a format (italicized English) that shows when one person in the scene is left out of the conversation, at least where non-English is in play. Later, after the characters have had time to "acclimatize" and learn the local language, I just switch to a standard dialog format. So, as long as these few phrases are correct Croatian, I think I'm in the clear, at least for now.

Thank you.

JD

 

Da li je ovo put do Pule?
Grammatically more correct term would be Je li ovo put do Pule? but that's based on newest Croatian dictionary and many people still use da li, so leave it be.
​

I think Croat means a person from Croatia.

Sobe is Croatian. It sounds more correct to me this way.

And, as they say, tko ne važe, nema blaga.”
Here, we use a small tick on z, it creates a letter ž (one that doesn't exist in English).

Everything else, Croatian wise, is correct. But you have to know, this is standard Croatian (the way we speak it now). You wrote somewhere that the novel is set in late 14th century? Back then, we spoke differently. It changed quite a lot through time. I remember reading Judita by Marko Marulić for school. It's first literary work written in Croatian (1501) and I struggled with understanding it.

​

 

Thanks. Considering most of my readers will be native English speakers (I presume a microscopically small market), I don’t want to go too far off the deep end researching ancient forms of languages. But thank you, this is helpful.

JD

 

Imagine the OP having a native Chinese character and then using Google Translate for all the dialogue. That would be a mess.

Then, I got my wife preggers. ​

becomes

然后，我得到了我的妻子preggers。​

我得到了我的妻子 makes no sense. "preggers" may not be pronounceable. Also, in the Anglophone world, people generally don't need to learn another language, because everyone else in the world is learning English. People in the Anglophone world don't need to learn about other cultures as well, but everybody else in the world would be learning about American culture through TV and the Internet. One girl on YouTube reports living in the Netherlands, but her childhood is spent mostly on watching American TV. That girl also has a Japanese-sounding username, so I can't figure out if she's really Japanese in the Netherlands or a Wapanese/Weeaboo. But anyway, the typical Anglophone would probably look at the Chinese characters and just draw a blank. Can't read it, can't pronounce it, moving on.