Bloomberg Makes a Localization Mistake
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One of my favorite Balkan currencies:
Source: Central Bank of Bosnia
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This morning I was reading a piece in Bloomberg, which made me rethink a couple of things. In Bosnia, one pays to emigrate, become a citizen of another country. You then surrender your passport to a tune of about $450 or 800 Konvertible Marks (KM for short) . The exchange rate as of today according to Google is about $0.58 to one KM. It's actually one of the few currencies in the Balkans that doesn't rely on over inflation to keep pace with the dollar. The Croatian kuna used to be a couple of years a go about 7 kuna to 1 dollar. The Dinar used to be about one dinar for every US cent. And in Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro, where the Euro is common, well there is no comparison. Maybe $1.50 for every Euro.
The mistake that Bloomberg made was one of localization, or globalization. Localization is defined according to Google as
"the process of making something local in character or restricting it to a particular place."
Globalization is:
the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale. It's an interesting quirk of translation that led to today's post.
In the Bosnian language, one adds an extra A or two to the end of masculine words, which are ending in hard consonants, such as k, to mean the plural genitive or Plural of. A thousand of Marks is translated as hiljada maraka. In English, we would say a thousand marks. Bloomberg, as good as it is, made the localization mistake of forgetting to take the case off when talking in a larger, more international English speaking world by consistently using the cased word marka, as in 1.8 million marka, instead of 1.8 million marks. It gave me a good laugh even for as limited as my vocabulary is compared to the probable translator of this piece! And I am part Bosnian!
Marka=marks.
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