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
Think about the English language for a minute. Do we have a word for literally everything possible? Well, no, obviously we don’t. When something is too hard and we can’t achieve it, we might call that “frustration”. When something is too *easy* and we wanted more of a challenge most people wouldn’t have a specific single word to describe that.
So we know that there are some concepts that English does not have a word for. What happens when another language *does* have a word for that concept, and we want to translate it back? We cannot directly.
There are broadly two types of translation. “Literal” translation means taking the words from some text and translating them one at a time into the target language. When this isn’t possible (or when it would not convey the same meaning) then we must instead use “semantic” translation, which is what happens in your question when a person “proceeds to give it a translation”. This means preserving the *meaning* of the text and allowing the exact words used to be changed.
If a Swedish person said to an English speaker the idiom “there is no cow on the ice” the English speaker is not going to understand – they probably have never had the trouble of their cow walking/skating out onto a frozen lake to contextualise this phrase. This is a failure of literal translation. If the Swedish person instead said “there is nothing to worry about” the English speaker is much more likely to understand even though the words used are very different.
Latest Answers