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

If I’m understanding your question right, my easiest way is to think of colors. Let’s say we have red, green and blue. We have a basic idea of what the colors are, and we can get more specific with other colors like purple, orange, etc.

Now, let’s say we have a very specific shade between red and purple. We’d call it “maroon.” However, what if a culture had a name for a shade between red and maroon? Well, there’s no direct english translation (actually there might be but not one I know off the top of my head lol), so to explain it, someone would say “a color between red and maroon”

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