SLOVENIAN

TOURISM:

NOT

FOR

FOREIGNERS

Ta članek je rahlo kritični do Slovenije in avtor je tujec, 

in zato seveda ni mogoče natančno prevedeni v slovenščino.

Slovenia: narrow minded view of the world

Betcha the missing "non-object" on the tourism and hospitality  chamber's site is the entire English version

Slovenia is a country founded on its language. Yet it displays a cavalier disregard for other languages.

Well I've been trying to persuade its oldest town Ptuj to stop wasting its money printing tourist information in Slovenglish gibberish. But they are resolute in their disdain for foreign interference.

And they are not alone, in Slovenia.

If you were writing tourist information for rich Slovenians visiting the UK, you would definitely insist on having no-one but a British student to write it in Slovene, right?

Because you voted collectively against Europe, so you could put Britain first, and take back control, right?

The resulting quality of such an ill-starred approach might look something like this.

Last year the only candidate for head of Ptuj's tourism drive was paid a bunch of money, as part of a valiant battle against the economic monopoly of its smelly chicken factory.

She then got a second woman to do the brochures, etc., who isn't paid very much.

This second woman then contacted me to see if I would fix her English ...for nothing.

The second woman needed to conceal the identity of the first woman as the first woman mustn't suspect someone could do it better. The second woman had no budget to dispense on proofreading. Yet she thought of the first woman as a "client". The first woman expected the second woman to take care of the grammar and all that.

Someone needed to. I said no, I wouldn't do these richer and less able people's job of helping to fill the town's pockets for nothing.

This smalltown tale shows how Ptuj tourism's first priority is to make sure everyone involved is - in the English marketing expression - treated like a cunt.

Especially foreigners. It is a paradigm of what Ptuj tourism really thinks. However I did send her an example of an item rewritten in a readable style.

But it was too rewritten, according to her. Everything had to be exactly as it was in the Slovene original, she said - no more, no less. Frankly I wouldn't want to be associated with something written in Slovenglish's usual dull and naive style.

Making Slovenia readable and interesting wasn't allowed. There was no correct way to fulfil the mission, and no allowable business relationship. Given this, erm, competitive atmosphere, I am hardly going to start and end an advertising business to do one brochure.

Near the end of the season I picked up the brochure and found the "client", who told me there was no job writing proper English for tourism in Ptuj.

I'd found 93 errors in its English portion. It was a beautifully-produced glossy turd of illiterate gibberish, I said.

It was nobody's fault, explained the first woman. They'd only had two weeks to put the city's annual programme together.

Though my basic error check took about 20 minutes, and could have raised it to at least literate gibberish level, this didn't seem to prove there hadn't been a job back in May.

Especially as many of the mistakes had been distributed virally onto the tourist map, leaflets, etc.

At this point the reputational effect in an open-plan office environment overcame any concerns about the future of Slovenglish and suddenly some more urgent matters arose.

They will do it all again this year. I want to help these poor people who imagine because they have passed an exam checked by authority figures - who may have simply got somebody else to sit it (like Ptuj's former MP) or plagiarised their thesis (like Slovenia's former Education Minister and present head of its Tourism Chamber of Commerce) to obtain their own pass - that they have a complete grasp of western customer culture from the last 50 years. I wonder if you operate a different tourism destination in a similar state of denial?

To help you in assessing my offer of fixing your similarly comedic English, for the record, my office contains no trendy furniture. I do not wear a nice suit and I do not have nice legs or complicated facial hair.

I would welcome offers from any Občina as follows: invite me there as your all-expenses-paid guest. Show me what there is to see and do, and for a reasonable amount I will write useful texts for your every attraction.

What will be different about these texts? Everything. They will not be written from the perspective of a cheaply-available Slovenian student who once visited London for a week.

They will not bore us senseless, ooze coldness and insincerity, or spook people and their money with weird English and clodhopping marketing like you normally do.

Then, instead of somebody doing their best and making a pig's ear of it like Ptuj and most other places in Slovenia worth visiting, your area will have a nice promotional piece for every one of all your venues and seasonal events which you can depend upon, and publish with confidence for years to come.

Other languages have their supporters too. 

Some of them are tourists. Do you want your message to look right? Or is choosing the right colleagues and excluding foreigners more important than the actual result? Ptuj's publicists cared most of all about their money, and least of all about the actual message to the world. How naive.

Of course English-speaking tourists are not much interested in holidaying with slapdash providers and a written presentation of sloppy communications, deceit and incompetence are the first backwards step in preventing that money arriving.

If you want someone to write it properly who also speaks fluent Slovene I can tell you for free, you won't find that. That doesn't exist. I won't translate Slovenian advertising word-for-word because 95% of it isn't even advertising - or interesting.

Tourism Slovenglish appears to be a language determined to make everything as dull, static, and tedious-sounding as can be. This is probably out of fear of what the neighbours will say if someone starts showing off or trying to get more.

This overwhelmingly underwhelming approach suggests the authors lack a proper grasp of what is going on in the Anglophone reader's mind. Quite a bit more than they think.

Really, Anglophone tourism is too important to Slovenia for English-language copywriting to be left to Slovenians, whose spoken English is considerably more impressive.

But to suggest, as do the burghers of Ptuj, that the first priority to be met in performing such a task is fluency in Slovene, well dream on, your educational method sucks.

On the other hand, it will be very difficult for this message to travel through the tentacles of tourism, as the very people asked to explain its content - via the torpifyingly square world of Slovene - may worry they have the most to lose from disseminating this admonition regarding their dreary old ponudba's total absence of fizz and pop.

This in any case is not true, except insofar as they - but only they - can get paid exactly the same whether ten thousand tourists arrive...or ten. Ptuj is hoping for the ten, but with the spending power of the ten thousand. And illiterate would be good.