I think most educated adults get that translation is a tricky business and that a skilled translator can relay difficult concepts.
Yes schadenfreude, now a full fledged English word, can be translated as “pleasure in the misfortune in others.”
But I think some folks in this thread are thinking too much like linguists and not enough like word nerds who see the word “schadenfreude” and think “There’s one word in German for something that takes a dictionary style definition in English. That’s pretty neat.”
The English pronunciation of “Schadenfreude” is about as close to the German pronunciation as a word could be. The only difference would be the “R”; English doesn’t have a uvular R. It’s not like people say “shade in frood”.
This is also the word used at Gen. 3:1 “Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field . . .” ( Genesis 3 Interlinear PDF ) (See here for table of contents to entire Old Testament Interlinear.)
Sure, but my point is that this kind of thing doesn’t happen (as it often is framed) because of some kind of intrinsic quality of the German language, but rather because the English speaking cultures haven’t developed a single word for it. As mentioned above, this kind of situation is usually the reason words get borrowed. Schadenfreude is English now, and people have been using it as English for a while (i.e., in print, it’s usually not capitalized or put in italics anymore). But of course we use all kinds of common, borrowed words that would otherwise require a “dictionary style definition” in English, without thinking twice, (kitsch, cafeteria, dilettante), so I don’t know why schadenfreude always gets trotted out as some kind of unique thing, other than that the meaning itself might be more of a conversation piece.
In the spirit of the OP, as well as to demonstrate my point, I’d offer potluck (the North American meaning). Most interpreters I work with just use the word potluck itself. Otherwise, you can plug it into an online dictionary, and come out with something like this in Spanish:
comida o cena en la que cada invitado aporta un plato de comida y la bebida
I don’t think it’s any big surprise that this is the case, when you consider the function and prevalence of potlucks in North American society. Of course, if there is some Spanish-speaking region where this kind of dinner is common, they’ll probably have some kind of regionalism for it, and that would go for other languages as well.
I don’t think this makes your point at all. Katakana is just different symbols for exact hiragana equivalents. Katakana exists to keep foreign words at arm’s length, rather than to allow adoption of words that would be hard to write. It’s linguistic apartheid.
I think the English word OK, in some sense, fills a need for other languages. You could argue it means nothing more than ‘fine,’ not affirmative, but not negative. Certainly, other languages have a word like that. But everybody the world over seems to have latched onto OK as the perfect economic way of expressing ‘acknowledged’ or ‘satisfactory.’
The shortest I’ve heard in Spain (where potluck hasn’t made inroads yet as far as I can tell, I did hear it both in Miami and in Costa Rica during conversations in Spanish), other than the assumption that everybody knows what we’re talking about, is comida en común. When someone found the expression strange, it was explained as a derivation of puesta en común, the process during which people who have been working on separate tasks of a common project get together to share and meld those individual tasks into the final result.
The French have frais. Not exactly “fresh” or “fair” but somewhere in between regarding the weather. As in, Il fait frais. It’s cool , chill, fresh… Not exactly freezing but not unpleasant, either.
Wouldn’t a lot of the tenses in english be a little troublesome to translate directly into chinese? As I understand it, chinese doesn’t use tenses in the same way. Inquiring minds…
Plenty of languages don’t use articles. For someone who speaks one of those languages, the difference between “I saw a show” and “I saw the show” might be difficult to grasp.
A question about “schadenfreude”. Is it a compound word (compound words being pretty common in German, and this word being on the longish side)? If so, I’m going to say it doesn’t count*. It’s rather arbitrary what is considered a word vs a phrase, and if you have a phrase that means the same thing, it’s just a matter of the rules of the language not putting that phrase together into a single word.
*Irrespective of whether it is considered an English word now.
