I need to translate a Swedish word

[ntsheep]

Is it meant to be "cheap nosh" or "posh nosh" I know this sounds like a joke, but I have known people that take it seriously this way.

[grävling]

I had to look this up. First of all, it is _not_ about oral sex. Then -- near as I can understand -- cheap nosh. Not really in a restaurant at all -- if in a commercial establishment, and not in your house, office etc. a deli or a pastry shop would be likely places. And yes, we have pastry shops all over, in part, I assume because people need these places to fika. If we had Starbucks (we have a few, but the big chain around here is called Coffee House), they would be good places for this. It is also not the same as 'going out for a drink with somebody'.

Does this help?

[qbspy]

Have you looked into the term brunch? grävling?

[grävling]

Dec 2, 2014 13:17:22 GMT -5 qbspy said:

Have you looked into the term brunch? grävling?

It seems to be a light _meal_, i.e. you have it instead of breakfast or lunch. A fika is something that you have _in addition to_ meals. Also having one in the evening or at night is perfectly permissable. It also seems rather formal -- i.e. you arrange to have a brunch with X, Y and Z. Whereas a fika, quite often, happens spontaneously when you run into somebody you haven't seen in a while in the street.

[tenbsmith]

grävling,

I think the social aspect is more important than the food side. So you might try something like "they got together over coffee and cakes." I like the term "get together" for it's informal/impromptu feel--based on what you've written I get the sense of fika definitely being informal and often being impromptu.

I don't think you'll find the perfect solution, but there are number of reasonable possibilities.

If you tell us the context in which you want to use the word, especially the audience, that would help.

For example, if you were writing a manual on Swedish business practices for English speaking foreigners, you might say something like, "Fika is an important custom for building relationships with business associates. It consists of an informal get together over food and drinks. ..."

The closest thing seems to be "coffee klatsch", the anglicized version of the German phrase kaffee klatsch. The problem with coffee klatsch is that it is NOT used that much in English. Well educated people should know it though.

[grävling]

We have written an accounting application for non-profits. I have a terrific example about how to set up the system and use it, all hinging on the various ways you can budget for fika. (The whole club can pay for them. Each training group can pay for them. It can be a part of what is included in your course fees, if you are taking a course, and so on and so forth).

It's all very annoying in that in Swedish this is a great example that everybody understands. Fikas can be very complicated things, budget-wise, for a non-profit if you have separate payment bins for costs, and you have just bought 5 cases of coke, and need to divide things up so that each internal unit pays for what it is going to use.

But I have tried the example out on non-Swedes, and the easy example keeps getting derailed on understanding what a fika is. It may be I will have to scrap the example entirely.

[qbspy]

Excellent point tenb. Remember grävling that english isn't as structured in use, as it is in print. I'd always heard that there are untranslatable words, esp. In Japanese and Russian. Not sure if I believe it.

[Officer Genious]

There's an untranslatable German word too- zeitgeist. "The Spirit" was the way my professor explained it when we were studying Dostoyevsky.

[ntsheep]

Dec 2, 2014 13:03:22 GMT -5 grävling said:

I had to look this up. First of all, it is _not_ about oral sex. Then -- near as I can understand -- cheap nosh. Not really in a restaurant at all -- if in a commercial establishment, and not in your house, office etc. a deli or a pastry shop would be likely places. And yes, we have pastry shops all over, in part, I assume because people need these places to fika. If we had Starbucks (we have a few, but the big chain around here is called Coffee House), they would be good places for this. It is also not the same as 'going out for a drink with somebody'.

Does this help?

There's part of your reply that confuses me, when I Google "posh nosh", I only get food related returns. At least with me, nosh has always meant food. Nothing else. Have a place called The Posh Nosh Deli near where I live. Very good food.

[contributor]

I think that if you're doing it for business purposes you've got to go with something fairly broad that "fika" can fit into. There's no way you're going to communicate the idea of fika without footnotes, which I've never seen in an expense report before. How about "refreshments" "food and beverage" or even "entertainment." "Entertainment" could mean other things as well but would include the type of thing that you're talking about. To "entertain" doesn't always mean to have a big to-do it can simply mean to make people comfortable and convivial. There is also that fine english word "hors d'oeuvres" which gets you pretty close.

I'm guessing you need something that people in both camps Swede and non-Swede will immediately recognize. So the Swedes know where to put fika and the yanks recognize it as legit. I'm thinking "refreshments" is the way to go.

[grävling]

Dec 2, 2014 14:15:08 GMT -5 ntsheep said:

Dec 2, 2014 13:03:22 GMT -5 grävling said:

I had to look this up. First of all, it is _not_ about oral sex. Then -- near as I can understand -- cheap nosh. Not really in a restaurant at all -- if in a commercial establishment, and not in your house, office etc. a deli or a pastry shop would be likely places. And yes, we have pastry shops all over, in part, I assume because people need these places to fika. If we had Starbucks (we have a few, but the big chain around here is called Coffee House), they would be good places for this. It is also not the same as 'going out for a drink with somebody'.

Does this help?

There's part of your reply that confuses me, when I Google "posh nosh", I only get food related returns. At least with me, nosh has always meant food. Nothing else. Have a place called The Posh Nosh Deli near where I live. Very good food.

I googled 'posh nosh meaning'.
This was hit #1.

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Posh+nosh&defid=2800575

Just so you know I am not hallucinating ...

[ntsheep]

I must be to old now There's no way I ever would have thought posh nosh meant something other than food. Thanks for that link grävling, I'm lmao right now.

[grävling]

Dec 2, 2014 14:53:03 GMT -5 contributor said:

I think that if you're doing it for business purposes you've got to go with something fairly broad that "fika" can fit into. There's no way you're going to communicate the idea of fika without footnotes, which I've never seen in an expense report before. How about "refreshments" "food and beverage" or even "entertainment." "Entertainment" could mean other things as well but would include the type of thing that you're talking about. To "entertain" doesn't always mean to have a big to-do it can simply mean to make people comfortable and convivial. There is also that fine english word "hors d'oeuvres" which gets you pretty close.

I'm guessing you need something that people in both camps Swede and non-Swede will immediately recognize. So the Swedes know where to put fika and the yanks recognize it as legit. I'm thinking "refreshments" is the way to go.

No, it's worse than that. I wanted to explain, with a fairly complicated example¸the power of our software. The idea is to pick something
that people are really comfortable with, and understand thoroughly. And since I was writing this for Swedes, and out of my own experience as
the bookkeeper's assistant for the kayaking club, picking the example of 'fika' made perfectly good sense.

But now we want to offer the software internationally, and maybe even have a kickstarter about it -- and it looks like I am going to have
to either scrap this example or heavily modify the story. I was looking for language to use to explain what fika is, to see if a paragraph
or so of cultural acclimatisation would work, but I am no longer sure that this will work either. My plan is to write other bits and then
try to get back to this with a more open and creative mind. Right now I am still caught in the dilemna -- fatal for an editor -- that I love my original prose, in Swedish, and I keep wanting to make the example work for non-swedes.

But if it needs a scrap-and-rewrite, well then that is what it needs. No matter how attatched to it I might be.

Thank you (all of you) for all your help.

Grävling

[ntsheep]

I hope you can find a way to work things out grävling. If nothing else, you given us all a good laugh and helped us out with a better understanding of English. I must be very careful next time a lady ask me if I want some "posh nosh", how I answer could get me into trouble or a lot of fun

[grävling]

Dec 2, 2014 15:40:37 GMT -5 ntsheep said:

I hope you can find a way to work things out grävling. If nothing else, you given us all a good laugh and helped us out with a better understanding of English. I must be very careful next time a lady ask me if I want some "posh nosh", how I answer could get me into trouble or a lot of fun

And now that I see that for some populations, a 'nosh' is oral sex, I won't be using that word, no, not at all.