Wanted: Proofreader who speaks Croatian (preferably native)

My burgeoning novel has elements of the Croatian language in it (Italian, too, but I have a resource for that), and I don't speak Croatian. I've been using Google Translate to get as far as I have, but I've already found that it's failed me for Italian, so I don't imagine it's reliable for Croatian. Here's an example passage:

“Koji put do Pula?” asked Marko. The man stared back quizzically. “Ovo je put do Pula?” 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, “Onu cestu, 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.”​

Thanks for any help you can offer.

JD

 

It won't matter if your wording is correct or not if your readers don't know enough of the language to follow. Something to keep in mind. I don't think google translate or these foreign words are doing you any favors.

 

But if my readers do, it will. I aim to be correct in what I write, at least when "correct" is applicable.

 

Unless your plan is to market your book to readers in the balkans, your foreign language passages are going to be just gibberish to many people. Sure, you can be correct, but that's not going to make people know what you're saying any more than if you slip up. I think there are better ways to express what's going on than using a foreign language because readers are not going to want to start looking this stuff up to know what's going on. You're even using google translate. Do you really expect your readers to do the same?

 

Not at all. I want to include the foreign language, but unlike Tolkien, who had complete control over the syntax and grammar of the languages he dropped in, I'm using established languages, so I want them to be correct. If you, the reader, don't care if they're correct, that's fine. But I do. And while I appreciate your opinion that I should just leave them out, I've chosen not to, for better or worse. Given those things, I'm asking for assistance. If I can't find aid here, I'll find it elsewhere.

 

I can't help, but I agree, if you're going to include passages in foreign, you should take the time to get them right.

 

I hope you're being ironic here. There is certainly some overlap between Russian and Croatian (in particular the word 'da' to mean 'yes'), but my Serbian friend says he "can't really understand what those guys are saying" when I asked him about Croatian, and both languages have a common root. Of course, he may have been hyperbolic. And don't even get me started on Hungarian, which appears to be entirely different than just about any other language, though I can't say I've done serious research into the subject.

 

Yeah, Croatian is related to Russian in the same sense that German and English are related. They are... but...

Hungarian (Magyar) is a Finno-Ugric language. It's related to Finnish and Estonian. It's often mislabeled as "not related to anything else", like Basque (Euskara), but that's not really true. It's just physically isolated from its Finno-Ugric relatives.

tl;dr

I'm not going to be much help with Croatian. Russian is highly derived (meaning different from the rest) when it comes to Slavic languages. Я хорошо говорю по-русски, но не по-хорватски.

 

I think it's worth putting in the effort to getting a language right. I think @KaTrian came across some book with a supposedly Finnish character speaking Finnish and she couldn't take anything seriously because it was all completely wrong. Whenever there's Chinese in a film, I'm always checking for errors (just for fun).

Like, sure, the majority of English readers probably won't know Croatian, but you never know. Why lose readers when you don't have to, even if it's just a handful? You worked hard on the book after all and it'd be a shame if a little, easily-fixed, detail took a reader away from enjoying it.

Anyway, Croatian... I do have a friend who's Croatian. She was here just an hour ago. I could probably ask her.

 

I never meant to imply it was okay to get it wrong. Of course, if you are going to do this, get it right. But most readers aren't going to take the time to try and translate words or passages. I think the context it's used in matters and I wouldn't use too much of it. Personally, if I'm writing in English and writing for an English-speaking audience, I don't think it adds much more than confusion without context and a light hand. Like everyone knows da means yes. But in the example given I just think that people aren't going to recognize much more beyond that. Just my thoughts on the matter.

 

I'm wondering: did you read the entire passage? Celeste, who didn't understand a word of the exchange, asks what was said. Marko summarizes.

In the next scene, I pivot (there's a transition point) from foreign words to translated foreign words. I use italics to show when language is being used that at least one person in the scene doesn't understand. It doesn't take long for the MCs to adopt local languages, and from there everything is just straight English, though occasionally, when necessary, I indicate that they speak (modern) English between themselves to keep others from understanding what they're saying.

I hope all this ends up being clear in the final analysis. Part of the challenge for readers in this format, where just snippets are offered, is that they miss the greater context.

I'm sorry we misunderstood each other. Better next time?

Cheers.

JD

 

C'mon @JD, you must see the lighter side of this?
..

“Koji put do Pula?” asked Marko. The man stared back quizzically. “Ovo je put do Pula?” Marko tried.

“Stranci?” asked the man.

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

'Ahh...ova da iste hotel 5 starre continentil, ova da,' said the man.

'Sim, chanku. Vatu tyme es lass ordes et dou tak Ameriiska Expriff?'

'Chertanly.'

 

So, Croatian friend replied and this is how she corrected it:

Kojim putem do Pule?
Da li je ovo put do Pule?
Stranci?
Da.
Onom cestom, a zatim skrenite desno.​

She also said the way she wrote it wasn't the smoothest, but since she didn't know the context, this was the best she could think of writing it.

 

Brilliant, thank you. The context is that two time-traveling twenty-year-olds (to be annoyingly alliterative) are lost, and encounter someone on the road. They ask for directions to Pula. This is (unbeknownst to them) the late Fourteenth Century, so having smooth grammar isn't necessary.

I have a few more passages, but not many. Is she willing to take a look at them?

Thank you (and her) again.

JD

 

You're confusing Slavic languages with Swedish again, Moose.

 

Assuming they are short like the above, I think she'd be willing to yeah she's very kind. Send them and I'll ask her.

 

The ghost in the story painted a message on the wall of her old home in her native tongue. Because it was grammatically incorrect, it made the ghost look like she wasn't all there. I doubt that was the author's intent.

 

Just as a tidbit and an aside, to help the person who is helping you... Croatian, like all Slavic languages, is an inflected language, which means the nouns and adjectives change spelling depending on what they are doing in the sentence, so perhaps if you give the original English, it would help.

For example, in Russian, and written with Latin letters rather than Cyrillic for ease of parsing:

Home = dom
At home = doma (That's it, no other words. The change in spelling is the whole sentence.)
In the home = v dome (not exactly the same as above, in the same way as the English versions are different)
Towards home = k domu (this is more like approaching/nearing)
To the home = domoi (as in I'm going home, which in Russian is distinct from the above)
Away from the home = iz doma (this is directional, not just some location that isn't home)
With the home = s domom

In some cases (no pun intended, these are all called grammatical cases) a resultant computer translation strips the target language of the propositions we use in English because they aren't used in Slavic languages. Note that at home and away from the home take the same form for the noun, with just the prepositional difference. An error, in that case, would leave your helper unaware of which one was intended.

Or the difference in the way Slavic languages engage degrees of directionality/motion vs static location:

Where are you? = Gde ty?
Where are you going? = Kuda ty? (no verb needed in most cases of idiomatic speech)
Where do you come from? = Otkuda ty?


The original English would leave no doubt as to your original intent.

 

This made me giggle

 

Koskenkorva?

Although it's not so bad. It's the black stuff that usually causes foreigners to lose their will to live.