You see it quite often when someone will say ‘there’s a word for that…there’s no direct translation but it’s loosely like…’ then proceeds to give it a translation.
I saw one recently of kummerspeck, I think the commenter said it was ‘food you eat when you’re sad’ or ‘grief bacon’.
I would also like to preemptively apologise for my ignorance.
In: 37
All languages contain words for which there is no direct translation into another language. A word being like something does not a direct translation make.
Most likely because one culture using one language had something they wanted to describe and so made a word for it while another culture using a different language didn’t have that something and so didn’t need the corresponding word in their language.
It means there isn’t a short or succinct way to translate a given term that has the same, or at least very similar meaning. Not that its completely impossible for someone to explain what the term means using English words
So for example you mentioned kummerspeck. Kummer means grief or sorrow in German. and speck means either bacon or just fat more generally in German.
So kummerspek literally means “grief bacon” as you said or “grief fat”. But what it really means is “the weight people tend to gain when they overeat because they are sad” in English we just…don’t have a *word* for that or at least not a word that’s widespread enough that most people would understand it. (I’m sure there’s a medical term for it)
It’s not just the words themselves, it’s your lifetime of experience with them that gives them extra meaning.
If I say “winter wonderland” to an American they will likely think of Christmas and Santa and candy canes.
But if you translate it to someone living in the southern hemisphere, they’ll hear you talking about a snowy landscape and say “ah, yes, I get it” but their understanding would lack those extra cultural memories.
That’s an obvious example but it works on nearly every word to a small degree.
Think about the English language for a minute. Do we have a word for literally everything possible? Well, no, obviously we don’t. When something is too hard and we can’t achieve it, we might call that “frustration”. When something is too *easy* and we wanted more of a challenge most people wouldn’t have a specific single word to describe that.
So we know that there are some concepts that English does not have a word for. What happens when another language *does* have a word for that concept, and we want to translate it back? We cannot directly.
There are broadly two types of translation. “Literal” translation means taking the words from some text and translating them one at a time into the target language. When this isn’t possible (or when it would not convey the same meaning) then we must instead use “semantic” translation, which is what happens in your question when a person “proceeds to give it a translation”. This means preserving the *meaning* of the text and allowing the exact words used to be changed.
If a Swedish person said to an English speaker the idiom “there is no cow on the ice” the English speaker is not going to understand – they probably have never had the trouble of their cow walking/skating out onto a frozen lake to contextualise this phrase. This is a failure of literal translation. If the Swedish person instead said “there is nothing to worry about” the English speaker is much more likely to understand even though the words used are very different.
Aleut (the Inuit language) famously has dozens of words for snow. Like single words to name specific types that English requires whole long explanations for.
There is an oft-repeated claim that Eskimos have dozens of words for “snow,” where we just have the one.
Of course it isn’t true… about English. We have snow, flurry, blizzard and if you ski, you probably know a dozen terms for packed snow on the ground.
But imagine you were referring to somebody whose language only has one word for snow. And they say “what’s a flurry” or “what’s a blizzard?” They don’t have a word for that in their language, so you can describe it… but when you say “a really light snow” or “a really heavy snow” to describe a flurry or blizzard, you feel like you truly have to experience a flurry or blizzard in order to understand it. That’s really what they mean.
On top of all the great explanations, I’ll add another factor: cultural context ads subtleties to language.
You see, the same word in two different languages might have small subtle implications in different languages. Even if the words are “direct” translations from one another (that is the word googled translate gives you) or even have the same lexical root, they might add different color when used in each language.
For example, “chill” in English has so many connotations, beyond being a relaxed person, such as “cool” and laid-back. So I’d you translated it to french outer Spanish you would loose most of the contest, and it would sound just like a relaxed person, without the extras color
This example might help: when Europeans first started mucking about in N. America they encountered all kinds of animals that didn’t exist in Europe. For some of them they came up w their own names, maybe like Trash Panda, but one of the great things about English is it’s very open to incorporating words from foreign languages so they adapted the Indigenous name to make the English ‘raccoon’.
I think you see the biggest discrepancies with Asian languages being translated to European languages. I remember reading about pissed off fans having discovered that an official translating company had cut out, or completely chopped up the translations from a Chinese novel. Reason being that Chinese is an old hierarchical language.
So the company was like “these people won’t know what gege means” and instead of adding footnotes or a guide, just either used the literally translation of “brother,” or changed it to master, or sir or whatever… Which makes it lose the entire essence of the situation ie the hierarchy and closeness of the relationship. That’s why people have to give you this long-winded explanation for you to get the essence.
Grief bacon should be a thing. Going through something? Your friends come through with 3 different types of delicious bacon
Latest Answers