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Norwenglish 3 – A Word of Welcome

March 25, 2015 by EmmaP

You drive your gorgeous rental Tesla out along the exit from Gardermoen airport, clear signs directing you towards Oslo or other exciting points in the Østfold. A sign looms up* with a friendly message in English:

Goodbye and Welcome Back!

You do a double-take – have you found yourself on a road heading back into the airport? How did they know you’d get lost so quickly? And are they always this friendly?

Closer inspection of the Norwegian sign above it reveals:

Ha en Fin Dag. Velkommen tilbake!

Directly translated – Have a good day and welcome back.

Velkommen tilbake: this is a charming expression – a wish that after a wonderful experience here you will choose to come back sometime, and that when you do come back you will receive a warm welcome. From whoever put up that sign.

But, my Norwegian readers, in this situation it does not translate as Welcome Back. That’s what you say when you actually arrive again, not when you’re leaving!

I’ll suggest some alternatives for this kind of scenario (leaving a place, finishing a website transaction, saying goodnight to the very last customer in the bar):

Come back soon! Come again!

Have a good trip!

Hope to see you again!

Thanks for coming/shopping/just being here! 

Or just the Goodbye is enough on its own

And here is a more correct use, where you will indeed be welcomed back in the spring to this tower on the Oslo waterfront for an amazing view.

Tjuvholmen Tower(Actually, it would sound better as “See you in the Spring”. Springtime sounds a bit Cole Porter-ish.)

To recap:

Velkommen = Welcome (that’s fine and dandy, it’s said when someone arrives)

Velkommen tilbake = See you again sometime, we really did enjoy having you even if we didn’t communicate it so well at the time.

* Disclaimer – it’s been a while since I’ve driven from the airport, and wouldn’t usually stop to photograph signs, so this particular sign might not be there, or worded differently. It’s an illustration of a scenario. And come to think of it, can you actually rent a Tesla?


About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

Filed Under: Language, Norwenglish Tagged With: norwenglish

Norwenglish 2 – Leave it as you found it

March 16, 2015 by EmmaP

It’s always fun to find ways to find equivalent words for some Norwegian terms. In our house we leave many words as they are, to keep things easy – barnehage, skattekort, trikk, matpakke, brødskiver and other terms that relate to the mechanics of Scandinavian daily life revolving around work and children.

In the blog post linked to below, the author has done a great job tackling 10 Norwegian terms. (Yes there are way more comments than content but it’s worth a read!)

My 2 kroner:

Kose – as verb, adverb, adjective – is a wonderful term and best kept in the original. It conveys so much of Norwegian warmth and good intent.

Takk for sist is also one of my favourites, once I figured it out. That was about the same time as Takk for meg/Takk for nå/Takk for idag/Takk for oss.

Døgn. How clever to have a word that means 24 hours, but you don’t have to say 24 hours!

Dugnad – I’ll come back to that one. The easiest thing is to just live here for a while and experience it for yourself.

Språkvask – the inspiration for this site! A lovely way to describe the cleaning or nitpicking of some text, to make communication clearer.

10 Untranslatable Norwegian Terms (Matadornetwork.com)

Matador

 


About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

Filed Under: Norwenglish, Translation

Norwenglish 1 – Numbers

January 7, 2015 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

Nummer
Photo by Theo Simons, Flickr

Ever think you might be writing in “Norwenglish” and not plain English? Not sure about those little in-between words, how numbers should be written, where to put a hyphen or a dot?

One little Norwenglish blip can trigger a reaction in the reader, and possibly lessen their confidence in what you’re trying to say.

This series includes some reminders and tips to help you along.

NUMBERS

One small difference in how a number is written can be confusing to those outside Norway. For example:

Company X has 3600 employees in more than 20 countries.

3600 should read 3,600.

Here’s a quick guide to how to write numbers correctly in English. For the most part, English uses a comma where Norwegian uses a space or point.

Norwegian English
100 100
1 000 eller 1000 1,000
10 000 10,000
1 000 000 1,000,000 or 1 million
1,5 km 1.5 km
38,5% 38.5%

 


About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English. Read more.

Filed Under: Norwenglish

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I write about language and the quirks of our family life in Dublin and previously in Italy and Norway. Read More…

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Wash Your Language

Wash Your Language

Musings on language and daily life in Ireland with memories from Canada, Italy and Norway

Wash Your Language

3 days ago

Wash Your Language
My new favourite word, #umarell.From Bolognese dialect, meaning little man. ... See MoreSee Less

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Wash Your Language

3 months ago

Wash Your Language
Here's one from the archives - back before I had a dog, I'd spend many waking hours looking at other peoples' dogs. Whatever the breed. ... See MoreSee Less

Besotted by Bassets - wash your language

washyourlanguage.com

It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella ...
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Wash Your Language

3 months ago

Wash Your Language
Ever feel like your day is full of cliches? Check out this piece written by my clever, fellow Dublin writer, Stephen Brady. -------At the crack of dawnI rose and shoneHad a breakfast of championsAnd blew out the stopsGrabbed the bull by the hornsAnd hit the streetTo meet and greetThe great unwashed;I wended my wayTo join the clubWaiting for the rubOf the greenTo set the sceneOf what might have been.I left no stone unturnedWhile the home fires burnedAnd the powers-that-beHad an air of mystery.But the empty vesselsMade an unholy noiseAnd the unstoppable forceMet the immoveable objectAnd the next thing I knewIt was an open-and-shut caseOf “we are where we are”where I was.At the eleventh hourIn my ivory towerI circled the wagonsGot my ducks in a row;I let sleeping dogs layWhere every dog has his dayAnd all the world was a stageWhen we were on the same pageI was flavour of the month‘Til I was yesterday’s newsMy talk was cheapBut I didn’t lose sleepThen it hit me like a ton of bricks!I’d been out of the loopLanded right in the soupAnd I was the last to knowI should have gone with the flow. At the end of the dayIt was a game of two halvesI was ahead by a noseBut got pipped at the postBy the Host with the MostAnd if turnabout is fair playYou could colour-me-amazedWhen the chickens I countedDidn’t come home to roost.For the grass it is greenerWhere the rolling stones gatherNo moss.(No loss.) Too many cooks spoiled my brothAnd a soft answer turn’d away WrathBut there were too many chiefsAnd not enough indians.Many hands made light workOf my best-laid plans(I’d had the whole world in my hands!)So I beat a retreatTo a threadbare roomWhere I quietly fumedTil the sun was under the yardarmAnd the daydodgilydamnablydone.-----Also available on the Inkslingers blog here. inkies.ie/record-of-a-day-rendered-entirely-in-cliches-by-stephen-brady/ ... See MoreSee Less

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Wash Your Language

5 months ago

Wash Your Language
Here's a (true) story I wrote and told at an event in Belfast last year. It's the tale of the accordion that travelled many places with me and which I decided to pass on to someone who would need it more than me. The nice folk at BBC Radio Ulster recorded some of the stories from the event and you can hear it here (the first one). www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0fr7t46 And if you have an instrument to donate in Ireland you can find the Gift of Music to Ukrainians page here. www.facebook.com/groups/5018344234885700with Tenx9washyourlanguage.com/the-accordions-tale/ ... See MoreSee Less

The Accordion's Tale - wash your language

washyourlanguage.com

I wrote down this tale of an accordion looking for a new life, and I told it at a storytelling event in Belfast last November – the wonderful Tenx9 monthly event. The theme was Small World, and so t...
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Wash Your Language

6 months ago

Wash Your Language
Amazing! ... See MoreSee Less

South African firefighters sing and dance after arriving at Edmonton's airport

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More than 200 South African firefighters deployed to help combat Canada's wildfires performed a dance at Edmonton's airport.Subscribe to CTV News to watch mo...

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Wash my language?

Språkvask is the Norwegian word for proofing text. Literally it means “language wash”; a more poetic way of saying it!

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