The clichéd expression “to think outside the box” has a long history in English despite its uncertain origin, certainly long enough to be familiar around the world.
However, the expression is idiomatic, and when translating idioms, it’s generally better to substitute an equivalent idiom that would be more familiar in the other language, rather than trying to find a way to render the expression literally. For example, in French, you would probably use a phrase which essentially means “leave the well-trod path” (sortir des sentiers battus) or you would just say flatly, “think differently” (penser autrement).
Which is why I was very surprised by a Norwegian TV show I was watching last night. Somebody said something which was subtitled “I had to think outside the box,” and in the audio, I heard what sounded like the word “box.” This wasn’t an example of a bilingual speaker temporarily switching to English, which I’ve heard in Denmark, Sweden, and other countries where English familiarity is common; the whole sentence was definitely Norwegian. I did some searching, and found that the word for “box” in Norwegian" is “boksen,” so this seems to be an instance where the English idiom has been imported and localised.
So now I’m curious. How many languages did not have a pre-existing expression corresponding to “get beyond the old ways of thinking,” equivalent to the English idiom, which would typically be substituted in translation, such that some form of the original expression had to be adopted and translated for local use, as (apparently) in Norwegian?
And as a corollary, for other languages where the idiom presumably hasn’t been imported, is it possible to create a more-or-less direct translation that would be reasonably comprehensible to a native speaker in its intended sense? For example, I’m not a Spanish speaker, but tinkering with google translate gets me “pensar fuera de la caja” as a word-for-word equivalent. Would that be understood with the equivalent meaning in Madrid, or would it get me funny looks? Are there examples of languages where a word-for-word translation would indeed be received as perplexing gibberish? Or is the cliché so well known that the listener would likely understand what you were trying to get at, even if the translated phrase itself was nonsense?
And finally, just for fun, what are some equivalent expressions in other languages where they do have a well-established and easily substitutable idiom totally unrelated to boxes?