First of all, I’m not really sure what to title this thread. Or which forum to put it in. Or even exactly what it should be about.
I just wanted to share with you all the fact that the Norwegian language doesn’t have a word for “enjoy”. This isn’t to say that Norwegians don’t know how to enjoy themselves, or that the language doesn’t have terminology for dealing with enjoyment - on the contrary, it has an abundance of it. It just lacks one single word or phrase that covers the same lexical space as the English word “enjoy”. There is the word “nyte”, but that is more for sensual, hedonistic or extreme pleasures, such as food, sex, bubble baths, or finally killing your arch enemy and getting to dance on his grave. Otherwise, you say that you liked something, had fun doing something, something was nice, you appreciated something, et cetera. Problem is, when translating from English, these will often not cover the “enjoy” without extensive retooling of the sentence. As a result, in translations (especially in places like the sports section of your local paper, with hastily translated quotes, where the original mentioned that “we really enjoyed the game”, or “we really enjoyed beating [our closest rivals]”), you can often tell where the “enjoy” used to go, because that is where the Norwegian translation suddenly trips over itself and falls on its face with an audible clunk, before quickly scrambling to its feet and getting on with it, with a look on its face like the one your cat has after misjudging the jumping distance between the sofa and the shelf.
Any other examples of this, in other languages versus English, or vice versa, or versus each other?