>>>You're right, that's the way it's used, but "hoist by my own petard" has to be one of the clumsiest phrases in the English language. It sounds like an anachronism (and may in fact be one). It sure isn't anything I would ever say out loud.
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>>Does it translate into the Serbian "ko drugome jamu kopa, sam u nju pada"? The most literal translation would be "who to other pit digs, self into it falls". Or, less literally, "one who digs a hole for another, falls into it himself".
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>Dragan,
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>From the online dictionary, To be hoist by one's own petard," a now proverbial phrase apparently originating with Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1604) not long after the word entered English (around 1598), means "to blow oneself up with one's own bomb, be undone by one's own devices."\

Then it does translate right. The meaning of both is that one gets done by something he prepared for someone else.

As a sidenote, there was a more comic version: "who digs a hole for another, is just a physical worker and will never have his own swimming pool".