Slave Mentality

South Slav Mentality: A Translation Prism

It is often argued Croatians require a leader, or a shepherd dog. They tread the party line and do not believe in electing the best for a post, but - appoint. Under this view, centuries of foreign dominations over "wild animals" did their thing, and now that they have awakened to independence, they are profligates.
Our current prime minister does not speak English. She does somewhat, enough to disgrace herself on TV by saying she "was in Hungary the day after yesterday". Franjo Tudjman, one of Balkan dismantlers, engendered the practice: not pursuant to his ideology of fierce independence, he did not speak Croatian before the General Assembly of the UN, a building rife with translators, but opted for a pidgin version of English instead. I, with my relative superior skill, would never go for that. What for on Earth?
It is not just the French that lament the intrusion of English: we simply do not have the cultural voice to utter it loud enough. Croatian bankers e.g., imagine, do not translate "the back office". Even the field I'm currently studying, the Cultural Studies, is translated within academia as Kulturalni studiji, ergo after the English adjective form, and the plural of the word study, instead of Studij kulture.
I usually joke about us trying to gain independence from Hungarians in 1850s. "With those peasants?"
And, oh, for the sake of in-country commentators: I love Croatia. This is why.