I’ve just been reading this http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2008/10/12/ten-most-difficult-words-to-translate/ list of foreign words that are most difficult to translate into English. Then I started wondering if there are any words in English that we all use, but which have no equivalent in a foreign language or require a lot of effort to translate.
Does anybody know any examples?
The article reminds me of H.P. Lovecraft. Much as Lovecraft would have a character say, ‘The horror that stood before me cannot be described. But this is how it looked…’ the article said, ‘These words are difficult to translate. But this is what they mean.’
It’s hard to translate the word ‘fun’ into Polish. The closest they have means more like ‘enjoyment.’ I tried to tell people that fun is a more lighthearted enjoyment, more exciting than just plain enjoyment.
“That roller coaster ride was so enjoyable” No, it was FUN!
For some reason that even I am not sure of, I just want to point out that you’ve set up an unequal challenge. The article you linked discusses words that are hard to translate into English. You’re asking for English words that are hard to translate into any language.
The notion that certain words can’t be translated is basically flawed:
Is there a word for that?
That article evinces a decidedly unimaginative notion of “translation.” True translation isn’t just transmitting literal meaning, but includes tone and spirit too, implications as well as explications.
Of course any concept in any human language can be described in English (or presumably any real language) if you allow yourself enough words to do it. That may be enough for mundane communication, but it’s vastly insufficient for art.
That’s all well and good but that doesn’t mean that the word is hard to translate. Just that you dislike its english glosses.
Heavy use of glosses is frowned upon in general. They’re inelegant and make the translated text cumbersome and harder to read. And if you’re doing real-time oral translation, or dubbing, or doing subtitle work, they’re even less practical for obvious reasons. The difficulty in translating something could very realistically be judged by the amount of source text you can’t translate without resorting to the nuclear, glossing option (or worse, “Note from the translator:” annotations at the bottom of the page. Brrrr…).
Some English or American words and concepts are also problematic to translate into other languages, because the concept simply does not exist in the target culture. From the OP’s article, “Tingo” is fine, because everybody knows someone like that. Tingo is a universal concept. Call a “tingo” a mooch if you have to.
But I recently had to look up what an “earmark” is to follow a political discussion and, well, I confess I’d have trouble translating any text containing that word - because AFAIK, the US Congress is the only political system in the world that involves earmarks, or any financial attributions handed out from Parliament for that matter. In most other countries, budgeting is wholly in the hands of the executive, not the legislative. So there’s no word or concept to describe a financial provision coming from the legislative.
Another troublesome word I came across recently : “greenwashing”, or the process a corporation goes through when it wants to publicly appear to be ecological or to make efforts to be more eco-friendly, but really isn’t. It’s not even a “real” word, but an English speaker will immediately decode the portmanteau of Green + Whitewashing.
In languages that aren’t so prone to coining neologisms on the fly, it’d be a bugger to translate faithfully or in few words.
There’s a difference between “untransalatable” and “hard to translate”. Anyone who’s tried to translate a text from one language to another can attest that there are certain words and phrases in the source language which are really difficult to turn into something sensible and natural-sounding in the target language. Yes, it’s possible to come up with a gloss that more or less means the same thing, but to do so while maintaining the appropriate register, and without resulting in stilted circumlocution, can be quite an effort.
There’s also the issue that languages simply don’t have words to describe things which aren’t known to their speakers. A treatise on quantum physics would be pretty much untranslatable into Piraha, unless you invent several thousand nonce words and add an appendix explaining, in detail sufficient for someone who doesn’t have any concept of numbers (let alone quantum physics), what each of your invented terms means. And even then I expect the appendix would dwarf the treatise itself.
French has no word for ‘nut’. There are words for each type of nut, but no generic term to describe them all.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious comes to mind.
How interesting. What about the term “money laundering”?
What’s wrong with noix?
I was talking politics in Japanese (badly) with a friend recently, and she said a word in a manner that showed that it was a common concept in Japan, that it’s a word that most people know. I didn’t know it, and so I looked it up, and had to laugh when my dictionary gave me a sentence-long translation. The word is amakudari: retiring high-ranking government officials taking a lucrative job in a private or semi-private corporation. I mean, we have sinecure in English, but that’s not nearly as specific as amakudari.
I suspect that terms from lots of governments around the world are rife with difficult to translate words.
Yeah, there’s not a good word for berry in Japanese.
Simple example : a *noisette *or *amande *is not a noix, nor would they be referred as such. You couldn’t say a chestnut is “la noix du châtaignier”. You could say *châtaignes *are “le fruit du châtaigner”, but it wouldn’t convey the nut-ness of chestnuts, if you follow my meaning.
In botanical circles, nuts are apparently described in French as “shelled fruit” or “fruit with shells”, but even that is something of a misnomer because some nuts are fruits, some are seeds, and some have no hard shells.
In French : blanchiment d’argent. Which is a direct translation, since apparently we stole it from you before laundering it to remove any trace of Englishness :).
Everybody I know calls this “two rings”.
Its called a “missed call” where I am from.
Earmark should be easy to explain and I can think of similar words in other languages, its not US politics specific.
And while we are at it, money is something most legislatures world wide handle.