Despite supposedly meeting the EU's strict accession requirements 19 years ago, vote buying is still a huge problem in Bulgaria. All Bulgarian election-campaign materials must state 'the buying and selling of votes is illegal.' Bulgaria is going to the polls on Sunday for the 8th time in 5 years!

CIOL Conference 2026, London

Off to the CIOL Conference today in London #ciol #translators #linguists

Al lago: Un viaje balcánico de guerra y paz, un libro de Kapka Kassabova, ya está disponible. To The Lake by Kapka Kassabova is now available in Spanish.

Sad to see that the Map Shop in Adelaide, Australia is closing. Map reading is a disappearing skill, considering many people rely on apps to navigate. But what happens if those apps are unavailable? A Macedonian flag used to adorn the window of the Map Shop.

On the ‘peace’ wall separating Catholics and Protestants in west Belfast. If Albanians and Serbs have ‘learned to live together', then why is Mitrovica even more divided than Belfast? And how random to see 'закон’ – ‘law’ in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Macedonian.

On the train to Heathrow and a Bulgarian Romani woman is loudly speaking on the phone in a mix of Bulgarian and Romani. I'm getting great info about getting jobs picking tobacco in Greece. You have to talk to Stefka, apparently.

Annette Jorgensen, whose family migrated from Denmark to Australia when she was 2 years old: "I was a 'clog wog', so more accepted than the Mediterranean 'wogs', who were more visible." Much is now whitewashed of the true levels of racism directed at non-Anglos in 1970s Australia.

The eggs are dyed for Orthodox Easter. They turned out great this year

Decent translation and cultural expertise matter... and that comes from humans. How come the supposed ceasfire agreement between Iran and the US has such different interpretations? It could have to do with the US State Department having sacked its Farsi experts last year...

Egg dye purchased! First time in over two decades that I bought a Greek dye brand, but what can I do when there was no Macedonian dye left.

8 April is International Roma Day! Note, not 'Gypsy'. Why the term 'Gypsy' is not the most appropriate term, and how ethnic labels with Roma can be complicated in the Balkans. 🎉 Bahtalo 8-to April Maškarthemutno dive e Romengoro! #InternationalRomaDay

Not everyone gets to record with the likes of Kate Bush, George Harrison and Linda Ronstadt... but this Bulgarian singer did. Famous Bulgarian folk singer and member of the world-famous Trio Bulgarka, Yanka Rupkina, has died. Here is her extraordinary life... Поклон пред паметта ѝ!

In 2004, Romanian Manele took Bulgaria by storm. Those hits are now back. It all started when last year Galin and Azis took the Adrian Minune hit Diskoteka Boom and gave it Bulgarian lyrics www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUTe...

A business name that wouldn't work outside of Australia... Well, not working anymore in Australia either, from the looks of things

Today is Lazarus Saturday and tomorrow is Palm Sunday in Orthodox Christian parts of the Balkans. Both days are celebrations of the coming of spring...

This new Romanian hit by Carmen de la Salciua shows how influential the songs of Serbian Turbofolk star Dragana Mirković have been on Romanian Manele. Major whiffs here of Mirković's 1994 hit Nisam ni metar od tebe (later covered in 2003 by Azis with Nikoi ne mozhe)

Last night watched The Partisan Necropolis, Chris Leslie's brilliant doco of how the fate of this WWII partisan cemetery reflects the division of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Biggest revelation – Mostar Croats speaking in a different accent from the Bosniaks! That wasn't the case before.

The Australian state of Queensland banned the phrase "from the river to the sea". But what about the lyrics to the chorus of John Farnham's 1988 hit Two Strong Hearts ("reaching out together from the river to the sea, you and me")? A mural in Brisbane is at the centre of it...

I told the Nasev household this morning that as we approach the Easter holidays, I'm expecting clients, which usually offer work first to cheaper translators... who are now on holiday, to be coming out of the woodwork and offering work to me. So far today, there's been three.

Note: if anyone contacts me requesting me to fix up their AI-generated translation, I charge more than my standard translation rate for this service.

Greece was a country of emigration until EU largesse turned economic fortunes around in the 1980s. By the 1990s, people were immigrating to Greece. That changed again following the 2010 debt crisis. Now Greece's villages and islands are quickly depopulating, just like in the countries to its north.

On the road to Goražde, Bosnia and Herzegovina, March 2018

Trust me to have spent an hour searching the net for an elusive 1998 Macedonian Romani turbofolk hit by the one and only Faredin Kerimov. No luck! I did find this one from the same casette... Is this life if it's without her?

Feta or white cheese? Prosecco or sparkling wine? How will the newly signed EU-Australia free-trade agreement (not) affect the terms Aussies use for certain products...

Interview with folklorist Yorgo Kaporis on SBS Macedonian, Australia for Harmony Week. I've known Yorgo since the 1980s! He was the choreographer of the Sloboda Macedonian dance group in Adelaide when I was in it.

The reception from sensitivity and authenticity reading reports for books earmarked for publishing can be hazardous – some writers take the findings as personal criticisms (which they're not). So it's always an honour when a writer asks I be included in the acknowledgements for a job well done.

From 1994 to 2001 I was one of the producers and presenters of the Macedonian radio program on 5EBI-FM in Adelaide, Australia. Great times! I unfortunately cannot attend this event today as I'm on the other side of the world from Adelaide. Поздрав до сите присутни!

I always love this photo of Debbie Harry taken in 1977 on Hindley Street in Adelaide, Australia. You could purchase the entire works of Lenin from the Third World Bookshop (behind Debbie). They were all arranged on the mezzanine level's top shelf gathering dust. Photo credit: SA Throwbacks

I've just arrived in Leeds for the second time ever and already someone has asked me for directions

I’m giving a talk this Friday (20 March) at the Centre for Translation, Interpreting and Localisation Studies (CITLS) at the University of Leeds, UK, as part of their Careers in Languages series. It's about translating from "smaller" languages into English. Log-in details below

Australian English: farewell and vale No, I'm not leaving here. Linguistically, Australians actually have unique ways of bidding farewell to someone who's going for a long time... or forever.

"I know of two tragic histories in the world- that of Ireland, and that of Macedonia. Both of them have been deprived and tormented." A quote Macedonian sources since the 1980s have regularly accredited to Roger Casement.

Today marks a year since the tragic fire at the Puls nightclub in my ancestral hometown of #Kochani, #Macedonia. 63 people lost their lives and more than 200 sustained injuries in the overcrowded and unsafe venue. Justice needs to be served! Вечна памет на жртвите! Правда за сите!

Much is speculated as to when the Australian English qualifier "heaps" (meaning "very" or "lots") came into usage. Some sources say it was in South Australia in the 1990s and went national much later. But I remember using "heaps" before then, and here's proof... a 1980 Smith's Crisps calendar

Either Christmas is still going for them or it's come very early Chapel Street, Melbourne, Australia

A sign of the times... With word going round in Australia that there's panic-buying of petrol much like how it was with toilet paper at the start of the COVID pandemic, I saw these jerry cans prominently for sale at Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne, Australia

The Kransky sausage, Slovenia's culinary gift to Australia

These are also the standard seated toilets in the Balkans....

Why bother with proofreading? Signs seen right next door to each other in Perth, Australia Shall we blame "scocial Media"?

This was supposed to be a joke statement but the Australian commentariat didn't take it as such

In the dull suburbs near my parents' place in Perth, Australia is this café, He Brew Café

I received this job request from a translation company I haven't heard from in years... They want a team of post-editors to fix up a 270-page AI translation of a detailed safety and operations report in 2 days... and then have a sworn translator certify it! Highly unethical!!!

My father is about to watch the Tale of Silyan for the first time. He's from a village just down the road from where it was filmed. It'll be interesting to hear what he has to say about it #thetaleofsilyan #macedonia

International Mother Language Day today To show why mother languages matter, here's my story how educators in Australia tried stopping my parents speaking to me in my mother language because they were "confusing" me www.nicknasev.com/blog/interna...

Five years ago we lost Yugoslav singer-songwriter Đorđe Balašević to COVID. One of his best moments was when he turned up to a pro-Milošević rally with a sign saying 'Save Isaura the Slave Girl' Here's one of his classic songs: I saw Tito three times

So which one out of these two is long-time Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov and who's recent Bulgarian president Rumen Radev?

Watching ABC TV News in Perth, Australia. In a report about the Winter Olympics, they mentioned about a "Czechoslovakian" athlete 🤔 What next? A "Yugoslav" or "Soviet" athlete?

Latest Australian English discovery: to farewell someone. Yes, we certainly use "farewell" as a verb in Australia.

The venerable department store NAMA in Zagreb, Croatia is gone. Its name was a contraction of "Narodni magazin" ("The people's store"), forming the same word in Croatian as "for us" (nama). Writers Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić even wrote about the department store in their books.