Some of the (political) analysts have been argued for years about the "originality" of democracy when speaking about the transition period after the communist period (1990+). The literal expression in Romanian is "democraţie originală" which can be translated to "original democracy" and is used pejoratively to describe a strange and convoluted way of implementing democracy.
However, Google suggests that "original democracy" is connected to the first(?) democracy, the Athenian one.
Indeed, the English word original has two meanings:
- present or existing from the beginning; first or earliest.
- created personally by a particular artist, writer, musician, etc.; not a copy.
In Romanian there is no such ambiguity since there are two different words for these two concepts (originar vs. original).
Question: How to translate "original democracy" (= democraţie originală) to avoid ambiguity and keep the pejorative meaning?
Something that crosses my mind is "creative democracy", but this sounds quite positive to me.