What does it mean when people say there’s no proper translation from a non-English word to English?

Question

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

Answer 1

It’s because you don’t have a word that’s a direct translation. For example, you can translate “porta” in portuguese to “door” in english, it means the exact same. But you have a word in portuguese “Saudade” that doesn’t have a direct translation, but you can explain the meaning of the word, is “that warm feeling when you miss someone or something”, or just “missing someone (or something)”, but you don’t have just one word that has the SAME meaning in english