Slovak Word of the Day 9: sýty

sýty adj. satiated, full

This one came to mind when reading Janette Maziniová's blog. I can't claim to really follow everything she is saying, but I did notice a nice Slovak idiom - vlk sýty aj ovca cela (a full wolf and a whole sheep). It's quite a common idiom as far as I can tell and the meaning is fairly obvious - something like to have your cake and eat it. I suppose it's exactly the same idea, except that in Slovakia the poor sheep takes the place of the cake...

Another good Slovak wolf-related idiom which you hear a lot is hladný ako vlk (hungry as a wolf, which again is pretty self explanatory). Of course foreigners wanting to look smart by knowing the idiom have to get their pronunciation right, because announcing you are chladný ako vlk is, as we have seen, likely to provoke more hilarity than admiration!

By the way, this blog approaches the Anglo-Slovak communication issue from the other side. It mentions hladný ako vlk (as an alternative to "hungry as a hunter", which I didn't realise was an English phrase...), but I am particularly proud to discover that "cool as a cucumber" should be translated pokojný ako Angličan!

Slovak Word of the Day 5: podobať sa ako vajce vajcu

podobať sa ako vajce vajcu to be as alike as two peas in a pod

This one comes from an unexpected source. I've been reading Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist translated into Slovak. The book itself I find rather overrated (but then what's not to like about the message "follow your dream"), but it's short, simple and available (according to the book jacket) in 66 languages. I'd like to get into reading some original Slovak books rather than translations, but for now it's much easier to read something I have read before in a different language.

Right at the start (I haven't got very far yet!), Santiago the shepherd meets the shopkeeper's daughter, who rozprávala o živote v dedine, kde dni sa podobajú ako vajce vajcu. In the original, it just says in literal terms "where one day was the same as the other". Is the Slovak translator getting poetic, or would it not seem right in Slovak to express that literally?