Всякий кулик свое болото хвалит

[hans-udo]

(Nothing like leather)

For "Всякий кулик свое болото хвалит" I find the rendering into English more than just weak. First of all, in over 45 years of exposure to English speakers - including over 25 years of working myself as a Simultaneous Interpreter at U.N. Headquarters, which "translates" into listening to countless exponents of the British-English variety, too - I haven't heard this version even once. It therefore fails the frequency test, to put it mildly, aside from being parochial in the extreme, given the - to me, simply odd or, if you like, oddly funny - reference to leather. Granted, I actually don't have a "hallowed," i.e., officially sanctioned or orthodox вариант.

I hope y'all here won't hold it too much against me, though, if I do propose a way of handling the Russian original: "All the hicks love best THEIR sticks!" The expression "hick(s) from the sticks" certainly is deep-rooted in the language. No one familiar with American-English usage would/will have any trouble whatsoever getting the point. Beyond that, substantively, it's probably true that, along the lines of "There's no place like home!" (which, not so incidentally, just might do as another translation for our Russian original here) --- the home of the speaker in each case, naturally --- most people do tend to prefer their "neck of the woods"....even if that actually means a city-slicker's particular borough or neighborhood.

Whether or not the reference to a "кулик" and a "болото" is reflective of your all-too-typical urban intellectual's airy contempt for those "out there" whom he supposes to be his inferiors in virtually every meaningful respect....that, of course, is a subject for another discussion for another day. For our purpose here, I'll let my two suggestions stand.

[pom]

Concerning Nothing like leather - I don't know exactly the origin of this term, but it has some references on the Internet:

http://www.geocities.com/fables312/idiom/Three_Tradesmen.html