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Norwenglish 3 – A Word of Welcome

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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.

Norwenglish 2 – Leave it as you found it

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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.

Norwenglish 1 – Numbers

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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.