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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Besides lack of contextual or meaning overlap others have mentioned already: it can also mean that certain cultural nuances are lost in translation even if the word has the correct, corresponding meaning. The person can then translate the sentence, but not necessarily be able to convey the message they meant behind it without giving an elaborate explanation. Sometimes they don’t know how to give it, because having that specific word of phrase in their mother tongue, they haven’t found another way of conveying it, as it seemed “obvious”, or just intuitive.
Idioms are a good example. Sometimes you can give it a go and it works, other times you just sound like a deranged person to someone who doesn’t know your language and culture.
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