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
I am going to make up an example. This isn’t a real one although could be.
Let’s pretend that there is another language we are talking about. In English we have the word “stupid” this word in is self an explain aultitude of things. You can say someone is stupid. Meaning they are not smart. You can say someone did something that was stupid. And that means they did something they didn’t think out and it caused a problem for them. You can also say that was stupid fast, and that means it was really fast. For a few examples. Another language may not have a word that works the same way as the word “stupid”, or mean the same things.
So I this other language, when someone says “the person did something stupid” and it gets translated, in the other language it has to be explained out. “The person did something that wasn’t very smart and it caused him further issues” so it’s not a 1 to 1 translation.
These folks explain language barriers better than I could.
Also, there might be no cultural framework for the target language to understand the concept from the originating language. For example, Mi’kmaq has no direct concept of time, instead saying things like “meet me for dinner when the sun is setting.”
Likewise, until Jesuit priests brought European clocks to Japan a few centuries ago, their time keeping system was based on dividing the day and night into chunks based on sunrise and sunset. So the word for “hour” might translate in theory (a portion of the day after which your time keeping methods would have someone in the town ring a large bell to mark the passage of time), it also didn’t really translate (the amount of time it takes to reach 60 minutes where each minute take about the same time as calmly counting to 60.) For the Japanese of that era, the town bell ringing represented 1/6th of the day or 1/6th of the night having passed. In the summer, that was a longer amount of time (in the European sense) during the day and shorter at night. In the winter, it was a shorter amount of time in the day and longer at night. So how do you translate the word “hour” when the target language has such a different understanding of time itself?
It’s not just English.
All languages have words that other languages lack.
It’s a lot about connotations, idiomatic meaning, and shared cultural knowledge.
Of course, you can always translate something – what people actually mean is that there’s no concise translation in one or two words.
Let’s say you want to translate the German “Fernweh” – it literally translates to far pain, but that doesn’t actually mean anything. If I want to translate the *meaning* I have to use an entire sentence, or use antonyms – roughly, “the desire for other places”. Kind of the opposite of home sickness.
Unlike a lot of languages, English has no single word for the day after tomorrow, so we literally say “the day after tomorrow”.
Basically, not all languages are created equal. Each language started independently developing due to specific circumstances and as centuries went by, population exchanges, cultural and technological as well as societal changes forced languages to adapt and change, often by loaning words from other languages.
A language doesn’t simply convey meaning but also emotion, and words and phrases and idioms and the general use of language has deep roots in their respective culture and history. When you learn another language speaking and understanding it right is not simply about using the same words but also understanding that cultural context, you don’t have to translate your thoughts in your head but think in the other language. Learning another language is learning about that specific culture and its history. Conveying meaning is not simply about using the same words.
Given how many languages there are it’s simply naive to think they’re all equal. There’s differences in vocabulary, grammar, and their ability to convey certain information or concepts. There’s not really a way to perfectly translate one language into another through direct translations, and a skilled translator knows that so he takes some liberties.
For example a famous anecdote is that the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow, all describing the different types of snow one might encounter. Conversely the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria has no word for snow. I think it’s easy to understand how such differences can come about. In one case these people live in regions that are covered in snow and ice most of the year and in the other they live in a region that never sees snowfall.
In a similar fashion languages grow and evolve out of need. In our modern globalised society and economy many languages loan words from others to reconcile discrepancies in languages for things we now all share. A notable example is Japan and the japanese language. Japan, a historically isolated nation, opened itself up to foreign trade and influence relatively “late” compared to other Asian or European countries which were much more interconnected through trade and knowledge for centuries. Given that they initially opened their borders for European merchant fleets, they borrowed many words from them to describe concepts and technology they had not seen up to that point. Watching any japanese movie or show it’s easy to spot their use of loanwords in an otherwise very different and distinct language than most.
I think it happens when there is an idiomatic cultural component to the phrase. While the single word conveys to the speaker of the phrase an entire story, it’s not able to be translated into a single word.
Let’s go the other way. According to my dad (who spent a few years in Thailand and is fairly fluent in Thai) there isn’t a word in Thai for “iceberg”. It’s not something that the average Thai person really ever has to think about, so they would basically just call it “a huge block of ice that drifts in the ocean”.
When Titanic came out, they needed a much shorter word for “iceberg” for the movie. They simply took the sound of the English word “iceberg” and said it with native Thai inflections.
There is no word for *entitled* in French. You have to describe the specific aspect of it.
You can say they are full of themselves, or that they feel the world is owed to them, that they think things that belongs to others should be theirs to use, that the world should bow to their needs etc.
But there is not a simple one word that encapsulates it all.
So try to explain the world entitled to someone who never heard it.
Even the online version of merriam-webster dictionary describes entitled as:
[…]
2. Having or showing a feeling of entitlement (see entitlement sense 2)
[…]
Entitlement:
1.a : the state or condition of being *entitled* : RIGHT
[…]
2: a belief that one is deserving *or entitled* to certain privileges
[…]
Very circular descriptions. It’s very hard to properly explain all the nuances and meanings of that word.
The same thing happens in every language.
It’s because you don’t have a word that’s a direct translation. For example, you can translate “porta” in portuguese to “door” in english, it means the exact same. But you have a word in portuguese “Saudade” that doesn’t have a direct translation, but you can explain the meaning of the word, is “that warm feeling when you miss someone or something”, or just “missing someone (or something)”, but you don’t have just one word that has the SAME meaning in english
As you already have a lot of explanations, ill give you an example.
SAUDADE
the most beautiful word in portuguese, its the feeling of missing something, someplace, or more often someone.
You can say “I miss my mother”, but there is not word for the feeling of missing. In portuguese we would say “Eu sinto SAUDADE da minha mae” which would translate to “I feel ‘XYZ’ of my mother”.
Latest Answers