An international office

One of the best things about working in a multinational team is – despite the occasional misunderstanding it causes – the linguistic diversity. We’re always learning new expressions and about how other cultures see things. Like when we were discussing the EYMD programme the other day and we realised that in each of our native languages we have the same idiom, but expressed differently. So while in English we say “to kill two birds with one stone”, Germans say “to kill two flies with one fly swat” (2 Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen), and in Romania it’s “to kill two rabbits with one shot” (“a împuşca doi iepuri dintr-o lovitură”). Trust the English version to be the least logical – who kills birds with stones? We were also discussing tabloids and the most important page in them: “page 1 girls” in Germany are the equivalent to what Anglophones call “page 3 girls”, and in Romania they’re all the way back on page 5.

There’s bound to be plenty more language comparisons – especially once we get our organizing team together and welcome another 40 or so European journalists into our community!