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

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Native English speaker here, Spanish student. I’m terrible at speaking Spanish because I love to analyse the language differences.. and that’s not good for speaking a language fluently because with analysis comes the desire to try and translate.. and that doesn’t work to speak fluently.

Apart from what people have already said (which is great): One example is that English has phrasal verbs amd Spanish doesnt

Eg: English speakers use “get” to “get down” or “get out”. I study Spanish, and Spanish doesn’t have the concept of phrasal verbs.

In Spanish, the verb “to exit/leave” (salir) is conjugated in various ways to represent “get out”.

There can be no literal translation here because the use of the language is quite different.

Also, I’ve come to learn that English can be downright weird and breaks rules everywhere.

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