Pitfalls in Norwegian translations

Chill. Rules. Join. No, there are no typos here, they are common “Norwegian” verbs, a language that is becoming more and more common, not only on the street but also on SoMe, websites, etc. But what about translations?

There are indeed “Norwenglish” pitfalls in Norwegian translations. An obvious one is translating too directly from the source language to the target language, which leads to equally obvious problems of sentence structure and fluency, or simply mistranslations (fortunately, “dead in the middle” doesn’t mean someone is actually dead and in the middle).

Punctuation and grammar can also suffer, for example using commas and prepositions exactly as they are used in English. Another pitfall is to think that none of this applies to oneself.

And sometimes we resort to the English term instead of finding a (more than) adequate Norwegian translation. But it may also be that we use the English word simply because it is the most common and so widely understood that it is the most logical. Or we mix up British English and American English, which can make cooking shows interesting to watch. For example, getting a biscuit with gravy would be quite strange in England.