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
Consider some very simple words.
Mother in English and مادر (pronounced madar) in Farsi mean exactly the same thing. So mother is a proper translation of مادر to English.
Aunt in English can mean the sister of one’s father or mother or the wife of one’s uncle or aunt. In Farsi, the word خاله (pronounced khaleh) means the sister of one’s mother. There’s another word for the sister of one’s father. There’s another word for the wife on one’s father’s brother and one for the wife of one’s mother’s brother.
So if you translate خاله into English as Aunt, you’re losing the information that she is your mothers sister. It’s not a perfect translation.
Going in the other direction, if you want to translate aunt into Farsi, you have to find out more about the aunt so you know which word to use. And in using the proper word, you are giving the reader more information than the English original gave. So, again, it’s not a perfect translation.
You can’t have a word to describe every possible thing. Languages are just different sets of words made up by different sets of people to describe the world.
While making up that set of words, choices have to be made about which ones to keep and some just never came up.
Think of just words to describe colors, there an infinite number of them, you can’t name them all. If a group of people have given a specific color a specific name, and you’re not part of that group, it can be hard to describe by just using other words for colors.
If you for example don’t know the color ‘azure’. I might say it’s sort of blue, but not quite. Even if I had shown you the color, you might not even understand why I call it azure, since to you it just looks ‘blue’.
When you know a specific word that describes something specific, you tend to notice it a lot more, and develop a lot of nuance around it as you go though life noticing that description. If you live your life without such a word, it will often get lost in a sea of “things with no specific description”. That makes it even harder to convey a very specific word to someone who never even considered it as something ‘seperate’.
If you never knew of ‘azure’ it’s just some random shade of blue to you.
Another example that comes to mind is cars, especially if you’re not a car person. If someone you know is excited about their new car, and they tell you all about it, point out features and distinctions. You suddenly see this car everywhere, while before you saw it everywhere as well, you just didn’t notice it, because it didn’t have a word.
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”.
Words are short-hand macros for thoughts, some macros are defined in most languages, but some languages dont have these shorthand names for things that have short names in other languages. They can be described, just there is no short name for them
In Czech, we’ve got a kind of pie that English just doesn’t have a translation, so I’d have to explain it as “flat wide dough circle with plum jam and sweet poppy seeds on top”.
They’ve very delicious, by the way.
Simply put, languages are not identical to each other. They are created from zero to satisfy the needs of a community. A different culture will create a different language, which in turn will shape its culture in the future.
Therefore, there are always differences. For instance, English speaking people are hungry or thirsty. Spanish speaking people on the other hand “have thirst” or “have hunger”. English speaking people can swim or speak a foreign language, whereas Spanish speakers “know how” to swim or speak a different tongue.
And sometimes, these differences amount to concepts that exist in one language but not in the other.
I just figured I’d like to add two things, though the titular question has already been answered!
First being – if you have the opportunity to do so, please try learning another language! It really is an avenue into seeing the world in a different way. Pretty much all languages evolved mostly organically, and they reflect a worldview and way of thinking that can be so very different than the world we grew up with.
The other is that – for those of us who have these ‘words/expressions that don’t exist in English/whatever-I’m-speaking-now’, it can actually be frustrating, because it places a limitation on our ability to convey the feeling or emotion to the other person.
In Swedish we have the concept of “Fika” which is very specifically a short social gathering over tea/coffee and biscuits/pastries. There’s no word for this in English, and saying “let’s have a coffee” isn’t quite the same. It’s a very particular way to socialize, and it’s unique to the culture.
Native English speaker here, Spanish student. I’m terrible at speaking Spanish because I love to analyse the language differences.. and that’s not good for speaking a language fluently because with analysis comes the desire to try and translate.. and that doesn’t work to speak fluently.
Apart from what people have already said (which is great): One example is that English has phrasal verbs amd Spanish doesnt
Eg: English speakers use “get” to “get down” or “get out”. I study Spanish, and Spanish doesn’t have the concept of phrasal verbs.
In Spanish, the verb “to exit/leave” (salir) is conjugated in various ways to represent “get out”.
There can be no literal translation here because the use of the language is quite different.
Also, I’ve come to learn that English can be downright weird and breaks rules everywhere.
Besides lack of contextual or meaning overlap others have mentioned already: it can also mean that certain cultural nuances are lost in translation even if the word has the correct, corresponding meaning. The person can then translate the sentence, but not necessarily be able to convey the message they meant behind it without giving an elaborate explanation. Sometimes they don’t know how to give it, because having that specific word of phrase in their mother tongue, they haven’t found another way of conveying it, as it seemed “obvious”, or just intuitive.
Idioms are a good example. Sometimes you can give it a go and it works, other times you just sound like a deranged person to someone who doesn’t know your language and culture.
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