Linguistic and Cultural Aspects of the Swedish Honorific Personal Pronoun Ni/ni and its Translation into Serbian

Сажетак

The use of the Swedish personal pronoun du (Serb. ti) or the use of the honorific personal pronoun Ni/ni (Serb. Vi/vi) in Sweden can be examined from several perspectives. Firstly, for many Swedes, this is a matter of linguistic and social identity, tradition, culture, history, but also of the context of the conversation. Shifts in the use of these personal pronouns have often been conditioned by radical social and historical changes spanning centuries in Sweden. Secondly, when mediating between Swedish and other linguistic and cultural communities, such as the Serbian community, the question of how to address others is also a cultural question, directly related to the differences in understanding the relationship between speakers in the two linguistic and cultural communities. The third perspective relates to a specific translation challenge which, in this case, refers to the confusion about the use of non-honorific or honorific personal pronouns in specific situations even among native Swedish speakers themselves, especially in recent decades. Translators, therefore, must keep up with linguistic, social and cultural trends in the source and target language communities. This paper provides, for the first time in about 150 years of translation exchange between the Swedish and Serbian language communities, an analysis of the socio-historical and linguistic prerequisites for the use of the personal pronouns du (Serb. ti) or Ni/ni (Serb. Vi/vi) in the Swedish language, alongside the tendencies in translation theory and practice in the Serbian language community concerning this linguistic issue.