At the end of May and the beginning of June, we had lectures with dr. Borislava Erakovic from the Faculty of Philosophy, the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. The topic was Translation in Business.

The lecturer talked about the main differences between two languages (English and a Slavic language: Slovene/Serbian) and how to translate bussines letters, agreements and other business documents. When translating we should bear in mind the differences among countries and cultures: e.g. a contract in Slovene is different in organization and in use of phrases from a contract in British English. If we neglect this fact, several misunderstanding may arise. This is also true for literature, books.

The following lectures were even more interesting because we translated service agreement and we also had a discussion on that. There are many differences between countries and one should pay attention to a lot of factors, especially the appropriate language (phrases) and structure. Therefore, we should read the original documents and we could use some corpora available freely (e.g. Glosbe). Nevertheless, translation is hard work.

I found the lectures by prof. Eraković quite interesting and I learned a lot: translation skills and the use of corpora is something students need also in Business English.

We also had a lot of fun but I have never thought that translation is that hard and requires such wide knowledge on the part of the translator.

Text: Suzana Tatić, Veronika Žgavc, 1st-year students Faculty of Management

Investment is co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union under the European Social Fund.