File talk:Jevrejska mala u Beogradu - Nadežda Petrović.jpg

The original title of this painting, in Serbian, is "Јеврејска мала у Београду, 1903". Word 'мала' (latin: 'mala') colloquially means 'girl', but also can mean 'quarter' (neighborhood), from Ottoman/Turkish word 'mahalle' which was adopted in Serbian and Bosnian languages as 'mala' and 'mahala' respectively.

In this particular case, it means neighborhood and not a girl. Since there's one girl depicted in the painting, it's easy to mistake mala for 'girl' and miss the intended meaning of 'neighborhood'. That girl is only a detail in larger picture depicting Jewish Quarter in Belgrade at the start of 20th century. In addition to that, using 'mala' for 'girl' is very low-brow, similar to using 'thot' to mean 'girl' in English, and very unlikely to be used that way in academic circles (as is the case with the title of this painting).

This translation error has propagated to Wikipedia in languages other than English (for example: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_des_Juifs_en_Serbie) and will need to be fixed there too.

Here's a newspaper article (in Serbian), describing old ma(ha)las in Belgrade: https://www.danas.rs/beograd/gradske-mahale/