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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43 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

You answered it yourself. Not all languages were created equal, so pretty much all languages have words that can’t be directly translated into another language.

For every day words like cat and dog, pretty much all languages have the corresponding word, but for more specific things some languages have a word, for others you have to use a whole sentence.

It also happens from English to other languages. For example, English has the feature where you can use nowns as verbs, so you can have sentences like “Google Cristiano Ronaldo” or “E-mail Cristiano Ronaldo” but in Portuguese you would have to say “Pesquisa por Cristiano Ronaldo no Google” or “Envia um e-mail ao Cristiano Ronaldo”, meaning “search for Cristiano Ronaldo on google” and “send an email to Cristiano Ronaldo”.

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