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

Question

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.

In: 37

Answer 1

This example might help: when Europeans first started mucking about in N. America they encountered all kinds of animals that didn’t exist in Europe. For some of them they came up w their own names, maybe like Trash Panda, but one of the great things about English is it’s very open to incorporating words from foreign languages so they adapted the Indigenous name to make the English ‘raccoon’.