Serbian Telekom as a wannabe colonial outpost

It began with the simple need to look up a phone number of a friend. I have bookmarked the search page ages ago, this one, which was named "whitepages.onpalm" - the "onpalm" part meaning probably nothing in English, but the phrase is a good fit for what it offered. If something is "kao na dlanu" (as if on [your] palm), than it's easy to see, in plain sight.

Of course, it doesn't work. The nadlanu.com is gone, and I mean gone - you don't get redirected to the current incarnation of Telekom's site, you get a 404.

So I search for the current one. It's "www.open.telekom.rs" - I didn't know that "open" is something that should be in the name of the national fixed telephony service. Bad omen... trying to find the phones lookup, I get this. A typical dot com page, where you can't possibly find what you need, only what someone in their marketing thinks you should be shown. The page is named "naslovna" (headline [page]), but the logo says "OpenHome"... why the fuck is this in English? Actually, how much English is in there? Let's see: there's a button which says "Open", and "Mapa home" - the first shouldn't bother me, I'm a local; the latter, if I tried to read it as Serbian, would be "the map of the homa" - except that word "homa" doesn't exist in any language I know. Below, there's "Open home", "Open business", "Open IPTV" - well, "business" isn't Serbian, biznis may be.

Searching for imenik. Literally, "namebook", it's the traditional name for any phone book, or similar volume with names of some class of entities listed alphabetically. There it is... in the bottom row, along with conditions of use and "general conditions for extending of services", whatever that may mean. Click... and baaaah... that's "poslovni imenik" - the businesses, with the typical yellow background (rings a bell?). Not likely to know my friend's phone...

So looking under "usluge" (services)... a fancy flash square with (gray!) captions fading in and out, saying, among other things

• "InoCall" (which is a bastard term - "ino" meaning "other", and "inostranstvo" (othersidedness) meaning "foreign" - so part Serbian part English)
• "Dopuna mt:s prepaid kredita" - which is entirely wrong. First, "prepaid" did not have to be in English at all; there's "pretplatni" (subscriptional), but terms "pripejd" and "postpejd" have taken root already, so there it is. But... "kredit"! Since time immemorial, in Serbian it means loan, no more and no less. Now how did they align "paid in advance" with "loan" in the same heading, is beyond me. Unless they didn't care what the word means in Serbian, and went for its English meaning, full colonial arrogance style.
• "Family Plus paket" - not packet nor package, mind you, it's a paket.
• "Pozivi ka negeografskim kodovima" - calls to nongeographic codes. That's stuff like 800 numbers - except that these were never called codes. These were "pozivni broj" - calling number. Yet another local expression, which was here at least 60 years, removed and replaced with a vague English one.
• "web plaćanje računa" - web payment of bills - now "web" is all of a sudden a Serbian adjective... should have been "plaćanje računa preko mreže" - "...over the web".

Finally, there's a "Telefonski imenik", which doesn't lead to any actual service, but to the yet another page describing the service (I'd rather not translate the text, this is not ethnography, this is a blog), and then there's a link to the actual page... where the Imenik is... described. This I must translate:

Telefonski imenik

Telefonski imenik su opšti telefonski direktorijum - imenik, sa reklamnim oglasima, ostalim pratećim i servisnim informacijama.
Publikacija objedinjuje kompletne i pouzdane podatke o brojevima telefona i adresama sa imenima fizičkih ali i pravnih lica korisnika usluga fiksne telefonije, poređanih po alfabetnom redosledu, u vidu besplatnog upisa koji sadrži: ime i prezime-naziv kompanije, adresa i broj telefona.

Izdanja su godišnja.

Prvo izdanje za grad Beograd distribuirano je BESPLATNO, na kućnu adresu, i to na preko 700.000 kućnih i poslovnih adresa korisnika usluga fiksne telefonije kompanije „Telekom Srbija“ u Beogradu i okolini. Distribuciju imenika izvršio je JP PTT saobraćaja „Srbija“.

Da li je moguće oglašavanje u Telefonskom imeniku?
Naravno! U zavisnosti od cilja koji poslovni korisnik želi da postigne oglašavanjem, moguća je upotreba tipskih i grafičkih oglasa.
Telefonski imenik se štampaju na papiru bele boje, boja slova je crna, a oglasi su u sivim tonovima.
Elektronsko izdanje imenika "Telefonski imenik" možete pogledati na Internet adresi: http://www.belestrane.988info.rs

Phone Directory

Phone book are a general phone directory(1) - directory(2), with commercial advertisements, other auxiliary and service information.
The publication unifies complete and reliable data about phone numbers and addresses of physical but also legal personae of fixed telephony service, laid out by alphabetical order, in shape of free-of-charge record, which contains name and surname - company name, address(3) and phone number.
The issues are annual.
The first edition(4) for city of Belgrade was distributed FREE OF CHARGE, to home address, and to over 700,000 home and business addresses of users of services of fixed telephony of "Telekom Srbija" company in Belgrade and vicinity. Distribution of the directory was executed by JP PTT traffic "Serbia" (5).
Is advertising in Telephone directory possible?
Of course(6)! Depending on the aim that a business user wants to achieve with advertising, use of typed(7) or graphical advertisements is possible.
The phone directory are printed on paper of white color, color of letters is black, and advertisements are in gray tones.
You can take a look at the electronic edition of the "Telephone directory" directory(8) at the Internet(9) address: http://www.belestrane.988info.rs

1.   here it says "telefonski direktorijum", which makes no sense in Serbian. The meaning of the word is "directorate". And the usage of plural is just out of place in the source as it is in translation.
2. now it says "imenik". I had no choice but to translate it as directory both times.
3. The  word "address" is in the wrong case; English having no cases, looks right in the translation, and very illiterate in the source
4. The first edition was actually printed some hundred years ago, but the new capitalists are no better than the old communists - they equally think the history begins with them.
5. "execute ~action~" is an old speech mannerism, inherited from the communist style of seventies, where they never peed, they executed a peeing
6. Of course it's an "of course" - specially when ads were announced in the very first paragraph.
7. "Typed" is not related to typographics or any typology, it's "tipski" - meaning "templated", of one of predefined types. English has too many meanings for "type".
8. Idiocies of this kind are common here. We had a "Kablovska KTV televizija" - literally, "Cable CTV television"... so it doesn't matter that "directory" is part of the title, they still have to repeat the word after the title.
9. By rules of Serbian grammar, internet is not a geographical location (does it have a city hall, city limits, is it a river or a hill?), not an institution (does it have headquarters?), not a person (who is this Internet guy?), so by all rules of the grammar it is not to be capitalized (except maybe capitalized upon, but that's not grammar). It may be so by English grammar, but this is the website of the, did I forget to mention, national telephony service.

I liked the NaDlanu.com much better. Actually, I don't remember much of it, went there just once, to find the link to the imenik, and bookmarked it, just like I did now. I do remember that it didn't piss me off by its wannabe colonial subject deference to all things English, and it wasn't so corporate looking - things were easier to find, and not hidden behind newly coined "product" names.

So they not only revamped the website, they went for a completely different url, in English this time, renamed a bunch of things on it into English or bastardized half-English-half-Serbian, made it hard to find things in... and yet the phone lookup page is the same as it ever was, once you find it. It actually works, the same as it always did, and still has the same bug: when you select the area code, the list of places in it (the 2nd combo) still shows only those in Belgrade area. Luckily, other areas don't have so many people, so typing a last name and a street will get you the info you need.

Џаба сте кречили.