'Sounds a bit Danglish'

Danes are good at English. A few years ago, we were world champions according to the EF English Proficiency Index, which ranks the English proficiency of 100 countries every year, and right now we are in third place behind the Netherlands and Austria.

We can be proud of this ranking, and we Danes are right to pride ourselves on our English language skills. But we can also shoot at each other if we think the others are not so sharp. 'That sounds a bit Danglish' we say when someone uses an expression that seems to be directly translated from Danish.

It shows that many have an impressively good sense of good, natural English - and that they are sensitive to what might be called 'Danish contagion'. But perhaps we are sometimes almost over-sensitive, and judge phrases and expressions out of hand, even though they are actually, well, perfectly alright.

At GlobalDenmark, we help our clients make English flow - either by editing texts that the client has written in English, or by translating Danish texts from scratch. Sometimes we find that a client asks: 'Can you really say that in English? It's directly translated from Danish'. And when we explain that yes, you do use exactly the same expression or metaphor in English, it can come as a surprise. A few examples:

We're confident that the new project will act as a springboard for more contracts. Yes, 'springboard' can be translated with 'springboard'. Check any English dictionary online and you'll find that the explanation is the same as in English - something that helps to set an activity in motion (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

With her outstanding research background, she was a great sparring partner in developing my ideas. Sparring partner can be used in English as well as in Danish either as a box term or in a figurative sense to refer to a person with whom one has serious but friendly discussions, explains the Cambridge Dictionary.

Work on the project is in full swing. Perhaps a hair-raising phrase for some Danes, but it is as correct in English as it is in Danish, and the meaning is the same, namely that something is at a high level of activity (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

The three examples are what can be called 'idiomatic' expressions, i.e. phrases that use an image to express a certain meaning. And the list of such coinciding expressions in English and Danish is longer than you might think. That's because we've borrowed and exchanged expressions with each other for hundreds of years - and still do. But it's probably also because the linguistic images stem from something cultural, and Danish and English cultures are no further apart than many of the images are the same.

For example, both languages use the term 'hot potato', but this is probably not the case in Chinese, where potatoes are a rarer item on the menu. 'Springboard' and 'sparring partner' in the examples above use images from the world of sport, and here it is assumed that there is a common cultural starting point, with gymnastics and boxing being well-known sports disciplines.

To sum up: sometimes you shouldn't make things more difficult for yourself than necessary when translating, but simply use the term that comes to mind. The problem, of course, is that this is far from always a sure-fire strategy. If it were, translation would be no art at all. The challenge with fixed expressions and metaphors is that they often differ from language to language. And if you translate an expression directly from Danish into English that doesn't exist, you can get it horribly wrong. Just think of Bertel Haarder, who told his ministerial colleagues in the EU that "Normally I say, early to bed and up with the cock". Or former culture minister Jytte Hilden, who put "The prick over the i". Not to mention former national coach Ricard Møller Nielsen, who delivered several legendary quotes, for example when he explained to the press that you had to "screw down the expectations" and that he had changed tactics so that now you would "play with long balls!"