Reader Question: Help translate political idioms

A fBabelfishriend of a friend is seeking good idiomatic Slovak translations for several political terms–“Spin” “Passing the Buck” and “Doublethink” and this seems to be an ideal task for the readers of this blog.  Just leave your suggestions in the comment space below. Thanks in advance!

2 thoughts on Reader Question: Help translate political idioms

  1. I believe the words spin and doublethink are already widely understood (depending on your definition of widely, of course). Any good idiomatic Slovak translation of these terms would, I think, still pretty much end up some sort of a newspeak.

    Closest to spin might be the word “prekrúcanie”, notable for its use by politicians in almost every debate, usually in a response to a query from the interviewer/moderator.

    I reached for my Slovak translation of 1984 to see how the translator dealt with this and found he kept the word ‘doublethink’ in the text, offering a translation only in a footnote: “dvojnázorovosť, viera vo dva protichodné názory zároveň”.

    I actually had to google the buck-passing idiom and if my understanding is correct, the closest Slovak equivalent I know of is “padajúce hovno” (dropping the ‘shit’ on someone else), or perhaps less apt “prehadzovať si horúci zemiak” (tossing a hot potato around).

  2. Passing the buck – prehadzovať si horúci zemiak, the padajúce hovno is valid only in hierarchic contexts from above levels bellow

    spin is a problem a bit, prekrúcanie is perhaps the closest, but still not “it”

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