Lost in translation

Or how subtle cultural differences influence our conversations.

I hail from Bulgaria, which is a fairly small country in eastern Europe. If you google our country, the first thing you may find is that our alphabet is Cyrillic (next to the booking.com offers for Sunny Beach maybe). What this means for most of my non-bulgarian friends is that, usually when they try to use a translate tool and get the Bulgarian word for beer, they end up with something that appears to be scrambled mumbo jumbo letters.

We are really proud with our alphabet, this is in a way a contribution to the world, since it was created by Bulgarians, and some countries use it to this day. There are even variations of it that include some Latin characters, but I digress, I’m not here to talk letters and alphabets, but rather I’d like to introduce you to the single biggest language difference we have with all the other European countries, and it’s not even the language itself or a specific word — it’s the way we agree and disagree.

“Don’t shake your head when you want to say Yes.”

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about Yes and No. Literally everywhere I’ve been in the world, no matter what language they speak, the simple non-verbal communication of agreement and disagreement stays the same: people nod in agreement and shake their heads when they want to say No. I’ve always found that fascinating, due to the fact that it’s actually the reverse in my country: we shake our heads when we want to say Yes, and just nod in quiet disagreement. If you’ve tried learning a new language, than isn’t your native tongue, most likely the first lesson will involve the letters, learning to read and some simple words, but in our case the first lesson is always: “Don’t shake your head when you want to say Yes.”

Now you might find this weird or confusing, but the bright side is that if you get to visit Bulgaria one day, and you find yourself in a loud bar, and the bartender asks you repeatedly throughout the night whether you’d have another drink, most likely you will be getting a whole lot of drinks, even if you didn’t want to. That’s because you would’ve kept shanking your head when saying No, without realising that you are actually the one that was telling him to keep on pouring you more and more. And by the end of the night, you might actually like this little quirkiness of ours.

When traveling abroad I’ve always had to hard-wire this information in my head, so I don’t give people the wrong impression, but sometimes this is bound to happen. I would say No and nod a couple of times, and I’d get a strange and confused look from the person in front of me, and it would take me a few moments before I realise how silly this must look, and then I would awkwardly change from nodding to shaking my head again. Ah the troubles of being misunderstood.

The takeaway.

I hope you find this fun fact about our culture intriguing, as I do, and if tomorrow someone shakes their head and says No to you, for any reason, just remember that there is a place in the world where they are actually agreeing with you.

Nikolay Lechev is a Designer and Front-end Developer at Kollegorna, a team of designers, developers and strategists building first-rate digital products and services.