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

All languages contain words for which there is no direct translation into another language. A word being like something does not a direct translation make.

Most likely because one culture using one language had something they wanted to describe and so made a word for it while another culture using a different language didn’t have that something and so didn’t need the corresponding word in their language.