I’m a sucker for any clickbait-y type article that lists foreign words with no suitable English translation. I think “schadenfreude” is probably the best known example.
But, are there any English words that fill such a gap in other languages? When Germans are bored at work do they read articles about “serendipity” or something similar?
I’ve had to work with translators from English into other languages, and I’ve found a few words that don’t translate easily.
One example: the English word “student” has no exact equivalent in German, because it covers children and adults in K-12, and college/university. In German, “ein Schüler” goes to K-12 and “ein Student” goes to college/university.
It’s a mistake to consider word for word translation as being sufficient. What you should look for is term for term translation. The term may have just one word in the first language but more than one word in the second language or vice versa. Another thing to consider is that all languages increase their vocabulary inventory in a number of ways, one of which is by adopting words from other languages. If enough people speaking a particular language decide they like to use a particular word, say schadenfruede, from another language, then that word is a real word in both languages.
Fascinating.
Previous thread. From that thread, “fun” is a tough one to translated into, at least, Polish. It’s apparently hard to capture the nuances which separate it from “enjoyable” for English speakers.
But, of course, there’s a conceptual difficulty at the heart of this thread: How literal do you mean “translate”? If you mean “conveying all of the senses a native speaker would understand, in their full glory”, then translation is likely impossible for all but a few of the most esoteric nouns. (For a physicist, “lepton” translates, because every physicist uses the same equations to define the concept; “cup” has a host of specific examples which the local word invariably drags along through implication which get lost in any attempt at translation.) If you mean “conveys the primary denotative meaning as decided by context”, then translation is usually possible, but may require a phrase or some other locution. (Purely functional words, such as grammatical particles, never translate. The best you can do is to write a description of the role they play in a sentence.) And there’s a whole spectrum between those extremes.
Thanks. Oh, I suppose I should mention that my A.B. is in linguistics.
There’s no word for “subtle” in Hebrew.
But then, if you’ve ever met an Israeli, you probably already know this.
Care to explain these Hebrew words? (I’ve numbered them for your convenience.)
[ol][li]עָדִין[/li][li]דַק[/li][li]מְעוּדָן[/li][li]עָרוּם[/ol][/li]
Or perhaps you’re just whooshing us along the lines of the old joke about “gullible is not in the dictionary”.
1 means “gentle”
2 means “thin” or “skinny”
3 means (approximately) “gentle and smooth” or “slight”. This is close to “subtle”, but not quite.It’s often used to describe food.
AND:
4 means “naked” (!) —which proves how poorly translation software works 
Thanks. I’m still going with the idea that “There is no word for X in Y language” is not a meaningful sentence. Hebrew very well may not have one word for it, but I’m sure you could demonstrate to us the concept is in Hebrew but the Hebrew expression is composed of more than one word.
I know what you mean, but “There is no word for X in Y language” is quite a valid statement. What is dubious, is a phrase like “Word X cannot be translated into language Y”, which is what you were getting at earlier in the thread.
It also means “cunning”. I think if you combine all 4 of those words together, you might get something similar to “subtle”.
I’m well aware of that fact - I translate for a living, from Hebrew to English, and I know to translate sentences rather than words. Still, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few words or phrases that always give me trouble. Usually I just write around them, but it isn’t always easy.
Schadenfreude is an English word - I can assure you the way most EFL-speakers pronounce it is not the way Germans do. It’s a word that English borrowed from German and that people still know comes from German, but it’s an English word.
Sometimes a concept that doesn’t translate word for word is as simple as the polite injunction please - the Spanish for it is por favor (“as a favor [to me]”), the French s’il vous plait (“if it pleases you”), the Italian per favore or prego (“I beg [of you]”), Catalan si us plau. Its sister thank you - in English, two words; in all those Romance languages, a single word. All those expressions translate just fine, but you need to take the whole expression into consideration, not treat the words as if their meaning was isolated from those of the rest of the text.
A different case is collocations, those words that “always go together” and expressions that “are just like that”. An image that’s in black and white in English is en blanco y negro (“in white and black”) in Spanish. The total words are the word-for-word translations, but having them in the wrong order is a dead giveaway that the translator was unfamiliar with the expression (it may even have been a machine).
This brings up a side issue I wouldn’t mind knowing more about. English is a very protean language. It shameless borrows and steal from any other language it runs across. James Nicoll’s line about, "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." seems relevant.
Are other languages like this and to this extent? I seem to recall the French government was very sensitive about this NOT happening at one time which implies that french was picking up words from other languages.
All languages borrow from their cultural neighbors; the discussion over “to what extent” and “how acceptable it is” is one of those that can go on and on and on… you know, like the one about “youth nowadays”? I’m a purist, but the difference between golpe de calor (brutal translation of the English heatstroke) and insolación (heatstroke Ogdamnit!) is in the end one of age.
And the Academie is not part of the French government.
Heh. That was great. Holds true for every Israeli I know (n=1).
Japanese borrows many, many words for other languages, though in the modern era it’s mostly from English. There is an entire syllabary (katakana) that is used for writing foreign words. BTW, most people probably don’t know that tempura is not a native Japanese word, but was borrowed from Portuguese (it’s also written in kanji, not katakana).
I’d also agree that “schadenfruede” is, nominally, an English word. As is “verboten” and “dummkopf”
Missed the edit window:
Verboten is particularly interesting because its a cognate of a perfectly good English word “forbidden”, but due to its Nazi association in the English Speaking World’s mind, takes on the added meaning of “really, really forbidden”. As in “we kill you if you do it” forbidden.
Well, threads and articles like this arise from the common assumption that translation is usually just an action of saying “[word in language X] = [word in language Y],” as though it were a simple mathematical function, and that the situations where something “doesn’t translate,” as in this thread, are the exceptions. This view of translation is predicated on the idea that words (in any language) by nature somehow have static, decontextualized meanings, that easily lend themselves to such a mathematical approach. The only reason we can often get by with this attitude is because we’re usually translating between two linguistic communities which share a lot culturally.
In fact, words don’t have static, abstract meanings by nature; words–all words—constantly acquire, maintain, or adjust their meanings through use, in specific contexts, used by specific speakers or writers, in specific points of history, who apply specific agency to that use. Automatic translation is only successful to the degree to which is can capture as much usage as possible, including as much cultural variation as possible.
Every translation—no matter how simple it may seem on the surface–is in fact a cultural negotiation. It’s just that most translation is going on between cultures that are very similar, so it only seems transparent, and we can maintain the conceit that translation is a simple “X=Y” mathematical function.