>Ah well, I guess I haven't seen too many Serb movies, sub-titled or not. For that matter, the only Serb I've experienced is from your posts and, despite being a "linguaphile", like yourself, it SCARES me! :-) But most other sub-titled movies I've seen, this is the case.

Just watch a movie with subtitles where you speak both languages. In most cases, you'll see how much they don't translate.

>However, I thought we'd discussed, in an earlier thread, how long-winded Serb was cf. English? Maybe my memory serves me badly.

Long-winded? Laden with redundancy, yes. Long words, yes. Few homonyms, yes. Separate words for a verb, noun and adjective of the same root, yes. But then, "upravo zato" - "because of exactly that" you can omit a lot.

>But you picked a long-winded word "brother-in-law" as an example. How about "Dad" or just "Brother". And, it might look shorter but the English is only ONE SYLLABLE more, despite this!

Three syllables in the original example, but we won't "cepidlačiti" - "be splitting hairs".

>>"Vodi slep sakatog" - "vodi" - leads, "slep" - blind (adj. m.), "sakat" - crippled adj. m., "sakatog" - accusative case. So, "The blind one leads the crippled one". Which of the seven words here can be omitted without producing a gramatically imperfect sentence. The original sentence is a perfect simple-extended sentence in Serbian.
>
>According to your translation, you said "The blind leads the crippled", in English "The blind man leads the cripple" - 1 syllable more.

Nope, "The blind man" is "slepac". "Slep" is adjective. "The cripple" is a noun, "bogalj" - "sakat" is an adjective.

This liberal use of adjectives as subjects or objects in the sentence is not so elegant in English. "Here are two pills. Do you want the red one or the green one?" becomes "Evo dve pilule. Hoćeš crvenu ili plavu"? And "Crvenu." would be a perfectly understandable answer, meaning "The red one" (with accusative case, so it is still the object).

Of course, there are other things in English that would need quite a longish translation, but, hey, I didn't say I'm leveling the playground. Just picking cases where English is longer (-winded) :).

>I was referring mainly to other languages, not one as sophisticated as yours, with all its nuances. No wonder they don't do a good job. :-)

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My regular gripe is the ambiguity of English, or, more precisely, the difficulty of avoiding it. Being educated as a mathematician, and having taught maths for five years, I've learned that even in my (oh so precise and unambiguous) language one has to be very clear and pick words wisely if one wants to get the content across. When I was working in Hungarian language (a completely different but likewise precise language), I still had to take care not to confuse the users with blurry messages. Now with six years of working in English, I'm a little tired with this fight against ambiguity.

My latest clash with it was the recent addition to the big app I'm working on, the label printing. I have a form with, among other objects, a few labels (i.e. baseclass="label"), which prints labels to a label printer, using Excel, and the template file is label.xls, and this whole module is replacing the old Access app, called label.mdb - guess how many times did I have to ask my boss which one does he mean? :)

set rant off