Do you have an HBO think level? 🤓 It's a business jargon edition! 💼
In which I use a Paw Patrol slogan as a translation
Welcome to the latest instalment of English and the Dutch, the newsletter with tips and tricks, fun facts, interesting translations and other good stuff about how Dutch speakers speak English. In your inbox every third Wednesday of the month.
The newsletter is written by me, Heddwen Newton. I’m half Dutch, half British, and I work as a translator, teacher, and linguist. I am the owner of the website www.hoezegjeinhetEngels.nl, and I also write the newsletter English in Progress.
Quiz
This Dutch speaker isn’t saying what they want to say with these sentences. What are they trying to say? What does the English speaker understand? How should they have worded it?
Our HR colleagues have been sparring about ways to transform our company into a forward-thinking, future-ready organisation.
We want to offer our employees flexible workplaces, quiet zones, yoga, company bicycles, regular massages and more.
Word has already got around! We’ve been receiving a record number of open applications!
Idiom
The two (!) idioms depicted below are the same in English and in Dutch. What are they in English? What are they in Dutch? (Remember the theme of this issue is business jargon!)
Family ties
Dutch and English are cousins, perhaps even sisters, depending on how you like your familial metaphors. In this section, I highlight some surprising ways in which they are related.
For this business-jargon issue, my subject was easy to choose: I want to talk about the Dutch word that holds the record for being borrowed by the most languages. An impressive 47 languages, including English, have adopted this word, adjusted it to fit their pronunciation, and continue to use it today. But before I reveal what it is, why not take a guess?
Go on. I’ll wait :-)
If you thought it would probably be a shipping term, you wouldn’t be alone. But you would be wrong.
The most-borrowed Dutch word is baas, which in (American) English became boss. It's also found in Norwegian and Swedish as bas, Sranantongo as basi, and North Frisian as bååis.
Some languages, like Greek (mpos) and Cantonese (bosi), didn’t borrow the word from Dutch directly, but borrowed the word boss from American English. If you include these, the total number of languages using a version of baas climbs to 57.
In Dutch, the word baas has been around since at least the late 13th century. It went from meaning the head of the household to meaning the leader of any group of people. The word spread over the world through, what else, colonialism. One imagines the Dutch rather liked being called baas, so it would have been a word that many peoples picked up.
Americans, in particular, embraced the word boss because it felt less hierarchical than the British English master. A related, but darker reason was that workers wanted to distinguish their relationship with their employers from that of the enslaved with their masters. They were labourers, not slaves; they had a boss, not a master.
So there you go. Not yacht or iceberg, cookie or coleslaw. It wasn’t our shipping or cooking that spread the furthest - it was our bossing people around!
(For this segment (and for my sanity in general) I am indebted to the queen of Dutch etymology, Nicoline van der Sijs, and her 2006 work Klein Uitleenwoordenboek, which can be downloaded as a PDF here. In 2010 Van der Sijs followed up with the formidable Nederlandse Woorden Wereldwijd, in which she lists, alphabetically, all the Dutch words that have been borrowed by any other language. All 747 pages are also downloadable for free. Direct download here, online version here.)
Untranslatable Dutch
Some Dutch words and expressions give translators a headache, because English just doesn’t have the same concept. Every month, I put a spotlight on two or three of them.
inhoudelijk
The theme of this newsletter gives me the perfect opportunity to dive into a word that was one of the main reasons I started a website about difficult-to-translate Dutch in the first place: inhoudelijk. While "substantive" is often a solid translation, English speakers tend to interpret this as "very important", rather than meaning a focus on the specifics of the content of a message or discussion (as opposed to the peripheral details like method or delivery). And often it just doesn’t fit. The sentence er zijn wat inhoudelijke wijzigingen geweest is, in my book, in the top ten of untranslatable Dutch. Much, much more here.
de praktijk is weerbarstig
This Dutch cliché is commonly used to describe how an idea that appeared promising in theory can be challenging to implement in practice due to unforeseen problems. I found an English proverb that conveys the same idea “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” It’s long, though, and not commonly used. A shorter translation is tricky to find. The best I can come up with is a prosaic “in practice, obstacles keep popping up”. More here.
Bonus: werk met werk maken
A Dutch idiom that can be translated, but that I still wanted to mention.
I did not yet know this bit of urban development jargon when one of my readers asked for a translation. He explained that it meant turning a task into an opportunity; when you have to replace a road surface anyway, use the opportunity to also reduce noise pollution, for example.
I also see this expression used online in the context of reusing waste building materials. The first English phrase that popped into my mind in that context was “don’t lose it, reuse it!” Which is pretty good as a translation, I think.
Anybody with children under ten will have recognised this slogan as Rocky’s signature line from Paw Patrol - my children are currently obsessed, and I keep finding reasons to go into the kitchen for a few minutes to escape. Who would have thought that this high-octane, technicolour nonsense would help me with my day job! More here.
Funny Dutch
Literally translating Dutch expressions into English often leads to very amusing results. Finding translations that do actually work in English is often not quite so easy. I like doing both!
an administrative centipede
Someone who is able to take on many diverse administrative jobs within a company, preferably all at the same time, is called een administratieve duizendpoot in Dutch. Charming, if overused.
In English we do not compare such a person with a centipede. In fact we don’t have any kind of fun animal or little joke when it comes to administrative assistants; all translations are rather boring. I quite like “multi-skilled administrative talent” or “versatile administrative professional”. I do not like “Jack-of-all-trades” or “multitasker”, because to me, both these terms suggest that the many tasks will get done rather badly. I’m on my own, though, as these are the translations you see the most. More here.
university work and think level
I put this one under “funny Dutch” because, well, where else am I going to put it, but the sad truth is that I have seen this phrase used in many a Dutch-English job ad.
The phrase that is used in native English ads for universitair werk- en denkniveau is “Master's degree or equivalent experience”. In my article, I also give some options for people who insist they want something about the “equivalent professional and intellectual ability”, because “experience” doesn’t feel the same to them.
(Once, I even saw a job ad that mentioned “an HBO thinking level”, which made me feel they were asking for a carpenter’s level (waterpas) that enjoys thinking about Game of Thrones and other series by the famous broadcasting giant.)
in the walking corridors
If you hear an office rumour on the grapevine, in Dutch you might say you heard it in de wandelgangen. The original corridors were the ones of the Dutch parliament, where people would exchange information informally. While the phrase can still be used in that political context, it has since taken on a broader meaning.
Though nobody actually uses the translation “in the walking corridors”, I have seen it translated many times as “in the corridors”. This makes me groan.
In my opinion, when someone nowadays says in de wandelgangen, they are not literally talking about corridors. Sure, they might have heard a rumour in a corridor, but the conversation might also have happened in a lift, by the coffee-machine, or even more likely, on Slack or WhatsApp. I therefore prefer translations like “word around the office is…”, or “during informal talks”. Lots more options and contexts here.
Quiz answers
Our HR colleagues have been sparring about ways to transform our company into a forward-thinking, future-ready organisation.
What did the Dutch person mean:
Onze HR-collega’s zijn aan het sparren geslagen over manieren om ons bedrijf om te vormen tot een vooruitstrevende, toekomstgerichte organisatie.
What would an English speaker understand:
Onze HR-collega’s hebben ruzie gehad over manieren om ons bedrijf om te vormen tot een vooruitstrevende, toekomstgerichte organisatie.
How should it have been worded:
Our HR colleagues have been brainstorming about ways to transform our company into a forward-thinking, future-ready organisation.
We want to offer our employees flexible workplaces, quiet zones, yoga, company bicycles, regular massages and more.
What did the Dutch person mean:
Wij willen onze medewerkers flexplekken, rustige zones, yoga, bedrijfsfietsen, regelmatige massages en meer bieden
What would an English speaker understand:
Wij willen onze medewerkers flexibele werkgevers, rustige zones, yoga, bedrijfsfietsen, regelmatige massages en meer bieden
How should it have been worded:
We want to offer our employees hot desking, quiet zones, yoga, company bicycles, regular massages and more.
Word has already got around! We’ve been receiving a record number of open applications!
What did the Dutch person mean:
Het nieuws heeft zich al verspreid! We krijgen een recordaantal open sollicitaties binnen!
What would an English speaker understand:
Het nieuws heeft zich al verspreid! We krijgen een recordaantal vrijdenkende??? sollicitaties binnen! (An English speaker would not know what is meant by the term “open application”. This is my guess as to what their guess would be.)
How should it have been worded:
Word has already got around! We’ve been receiving a record number of unsolicited applications!
(From the point of view of the job hunter I like the term “initiative application”)
idioms
laaghangend fruit - low-hanging fruit
het zit in de pijplijn - it’s in the pipeline
The reason for the various ball-shaped things is that I tried to get the AI to also add “to get the ball rolling” (het balletje aan het rollen brengen), but it couldn’t manage it.
Bonus points for “de appel valt niet ver van de boom” - “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”. It’s not a business phrase, but it is the same in Dutch and in English, so yay for you if you thought of that one! (And I guess we could think of a scenario where the boss’s son or daughter takes over and they turn out to be just as [fill in the blank] as their parent.)
And finally…
And finally, a silly joke, funny video or interesting picture that I found on the Internet, that has something to do with Dutch and English.
Nothing to do with language this time, but with a prominent role for the Netherlands I thought this stupid graph would be a good choice for this business-jargon issue. Stupid graphs and business jargon often go hand-in-hand, after all.
It's real, though once the social media feedback started flooding in, the patient.info website where it came from quickly replaced it with a graph that had a vertical axis starting at zero. Which, you know, it should have done all along.
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Any mistakes in this newsletter were put in by me AFTER my two amazing proofreaders checked through it. Thank you, you wonderful people!
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I loved this, Heddwen. It reminds of my years working in Holland. Visitors from the US parent company would fly in and start talking about "The whole nine yards" or "behind the eight ball." We decided to get even by using literal translations of Dutch idioms in meetings with our American overlords. Fun times.
I translate from Dutch and English into Italian, therefore your posts are extremely useful and interesting to me, Heddwen, hartelijk dank!