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.
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These folks explain language barriers better than I could.
Also, there might be no cultural framework for the target language to understand the concept from the originating language. For example, Mi’kmaq has no direct concept of time, instead saying things like “meet me for dinner when the sun is setting.”
Likewise, until Jesuit priests brought European clocks to Japan a few centuries ago, their time keeping system was based on dividing the day and night into chunks based on sunrise and sunset. So the word for “hour” might translate in theory (a portion of the day after which your time keeping methods would have someone in the town ring a large bell to mark the passage of time), it also didn’t really translate (the amount of time it takes to reach 60 minutes where each minute take about the same time as calmly counting to 60.) For the Japanese of that era, the town bell ringing represented 1/6th of the day or 1/6th of the night having passed. In the summer, that was a longer amount of time (in the European sense) during the day and shorter at night. In the winter, it was a shorter amount of time in the day and longer at night. So how do you translate the word “hour” when the target language has such a different understanding of time itself?
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