>>Three syllables in the original example, but we won't "cepidlačiti" - "be splitting hairs".
>
>No "split hairs" 2 syll. cf. your 5! just to split hairs.

One of the rare cases when you can get away without an article :). Sometimes you need a whole newspaper.

>>>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.
>
>I'm saying what we'd HAVE to say for the English equiv.

Which actually confirms my other view of the difference between our languages - English is so noun-oriented, while Serbian (and in extension, probably other Slavic languages as well) are verb-oriented. Just count how many times you "do/make/get/perfom a {insert a noun here}"; for most of these cases we have proper verbs. We don't get drunk, we ondrink ourselves; we don't "do the {actor name here} act", we "act the {name here}" (actually, we don't use "act" - nothing derived from ago, agere; there's a specific verb for actor's play).

This is another obstacle for the translators - if they get their minds wrapped aronund the noun paradigm, and try to keep it in the translation, the resulting sentence is at least clumsy. Likewise, the verb paradigm doesn't hold the water too well in English, because the more appropriate word is usually a noun.

>>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).
>
>No, "the red or the green" is quite acceptable,

...except that it may mean plural (not in the given context, though, and I won't compose another example where the case+gender+number being packed into the adjective would save me two or three words in translation, but I could).

> and probably more normal. Picture a lady getting dressed for a big night out: "Which dress should I wear - the black, the red, the strapless or the low-cut?"

"Koju [haljinu] da obučem - crvenu, zelenu, bez naramenica ili sa izrezom?"

The omitted word is "dress" - it's implied by the gender of "koju" (which one - fem, singular, accusative); also excludes shoes, because there's a different verb for putting footwear on). However, note that I didn't have a word for "strapless" - such words exist, just prefix them with bez- (without), but "beznaramenična" never made it into the dictionary nor into any sentence ever. Also, "sa izrezom" ("with excision", literally) shows that Serbian language doesn't take composite expressions as easily as English.

>>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? :)
>
>You've lost me here :-(

Q.E.D.