Well, Spanish has a passive voice too (las llaves fueron olvidadas). The cool thing about the “se me olvidaron” construction is that you are still in the sentence, so it’s as if your keys lost themselves on purpose to spite you.
Originally posted by PookahMacPhellimey
Hahahaha. 
Thanks Pookah, you sound like my great-aunt and you’ve made my day.
Originally posted by js_africanus
How about “plethora” . I’m partial to that word and I don’t believe there’s a good translation in at least German and Dutch?
I like the Dutch (or just Flemish?) “Borreltje”/Borrel-- an after-work drinkie-poo at a cafe (refers to, I think, the drink and the activity of going for a drink-- verb borrelen?). Along with that, “borrelhapjes”-- hors d’oeuvres that you have with your borreltje.
I’ve probably misspelled every word in this post.
Care to give us a translation on those, for us mono-linguists? And while you’re at it, what about “lighthouse,” the towers with beacons on the top for warning ships about getting too close to shore? A friend of mine had a devil of a time trying to explain what a lighthouse is to a woman from Brazil, I think it was. What’s the Spanish word for that?
The first ones were translating “to sharpen one’s pencil,” for the poster who asked.
In Spanish, a lighthouse is “un faro.” There’s a famous one in A Coruña in Galicia.
Since the woman was from Brazil, btw, the Portuguese word is “farol.”
My favorite, and very basic, untranslatable Polish word: “a”. It’s kind of like “and”, it’s kind of like “but”. The closest thing to it that I can think of in English would be “;” - something that divides two ideas or statements and puts them in a position where they are being compared. However, “a” can be used at the beginning of a sentence, and also in place of “versus”.
Hebrew has no word for “subtle”, which is oddly appropriate.
hehehehe, Alessan
Yes. It’s usually used to describe this. 5 being the time when you leave work, and 7 the time when you come back home. So it generally refers to an affair, and so rarely to a cocktail that I wasn’t even aware of this use.
A lot of words related to computers have been borrowed into french like “e-mail” for example, despite attempts to replace them by a french alternative, but it’s not the case of the word “computer” itself. French people don’t use this word. It’s called an “ordinateur”.
malapropism: misapplication of (sus. spoken) words. Since this is named for an 19th century literary character, is there a translation for this phenomenon in other languages?
Certain other eponyms may be difficult to translate, too. Consider: what words or phrases entirely encapsulize the mystery and suspense of something Hitchcockian, the conservativism of a policy that’s Reaganesque, the extreme difficulty of something herculean?
Pillock
A fluent (but non-native) speaker of Danish told me that the Danes often have trouble understanding some English abstract verbs such as ‘go’, apparently because “I’m walking to the store”, or “I’m driving to the store” etc are used instead of “I’m going to the store”. Perhaps someone could confirm or debunk this?
Do other languages have an equivalent to “D’OH” as in Homer Simpson.
It seems Canadians and Kiwis have some language in common. But Eh is many functional. It also means “whatever you just said say it again” (Eh? Pardon?) and “Are you f**king kidding!” (EH!..Really!) and I agree with you completely (It was good eh)
It will be lovely tomorrow eh.
Multi functona! Many functional doesn’t make sense eh?
Great thread!
**Noone Special ** and Kyla, even though my family lived in Israel 30 years ago and speak English and Spanish at home, we still say ‘davka’ because there simply isn’t an equivalent in or main languages.
Mighty_Girl, we’ve had the ‘empalagoso’ discussion before, haven’t we? The English ‘cloying’ is close but doesn’t quite get there. A very sweet dessert is ‘empalagoso’ but so is Julio Iglesias.
Kiwis and Canadians, many Spanish speakers use a rhetorical ‘¿No?’ at the end of a sentence which is equivalent to your ‘Eh?’
Davka!
The Japanese equivalent of “D’OH” is, I believe, “shimatta”. In Chinese, there’s “aiyah”, but that’s more of a general reaction of dismay.
As for the “yugen” mentioned earlier, I plugged it into a handy dandy Japanese online dictionary which translates it as “occult, mystery”.
I can’t read Japanese, but from the kanji, it suggests a deep, unpenetrable mystery, a sort of ethereal riddle. So it’s that feeling you get when you pass something intriguing on your way to someplace else and you can only think, “I wonder…”
I’m still looking for something more succinct than:
“It’s like when your friend is getting married, and everybody else thinks she’s totally nuts and making the biggest mistake of her life, but you can’t shake the feeling that maybe she’s onto something and you want to wish her every happiness, but you don’t want to go on record as saying anything just in case things do go south, so you just stand aside and watch her walk down the aisle.”
Because I can’t fit that much text on my picture I’m trying to caption.