On untranslatable words

[dorchadas]

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "untranslatable words" and all those lists of various words from other languages that don't exist in English. Now, I know what they mean--they mean that words like 木漏れ日 komorebi or פירגון firgun don't have exact one-to-one equivalents in English, but that's not the same as being untranslatable. All human languages can express the sum total of human experience. For example:

• komorebi means "the sunlight filtering through the leaves."
• firgun means "unselfish joy felt when viewing other's accomplishments."

Sure, English doesn't have words for those specific concepts but that doesn't mean they're untranslatable because I just translated them! And sometimes they do have exact equivalents in non-English languages--for example, firgun translated into Sanskrit is muditā. Sometimes these articles seem to imply that English has a particular paucity of expression, and that's simply not true. English actually has a very high number of words compared to other languages. The Akademyah estimates around 45,000 words in modern Hebrew, not counting compound words. French has around 60,000, whereas English has over 100,000. But that also runs into its own problem of "what is a word." To pick something relevant to my own hobbies, there's eternal debate over "video games" vs. "videogames." Spellcheck tells me the former is correct and that's the spelling I used in my DW tag, but the latter spelling looks more correct to me now, and it's a word whereas the former is not.

Anyway, here's a few English words that don't often have a single-word equivalent in other languages:

• Cheesy
• Fortnight
• Okay
• Kerfuffle
• Spam

Comments

[corvi]

I was delighted to discover the somewhat archaic "ereyesterday", English's equivalent to the extremely useful 一昨日.

[dorchadas]

I use ereyesterday (and overmorrow) in daily conversation with the hope of bringing them back into widespread use!

[corvi]

We need pins or something that say "ereyesterday afficianado". Secret handshakes, that sort of thing.

[aguart]

I think some of the same words are become international. For example ok and spam.
It's interesting theme. I have found a translation of Kerfuffle in russian.
One word "Суматоха(sumatoha)" or "Суета(suiːeta)".
Cheesy is like crappy, trashy am I right?

[dorchadas]

Okay is definitely international--when I lived in Japan they used it all the time! I heard オッケーです surprisingly often at work. Hebrew has אוקי too.

Cheesy is like...hmm. Something that is overdramatic, or trying to hard to create emotion but in a way that falls flat. I asked my friend Динара how she would translate it and she said

I don’t think there’s a word for it: I think I’d say dumb or silly (‘глупый’), or if it’s fun kind of cheesy I’d say ‘прикольный’, if it’s cringy cheesy, something like ‘фу’ or ‘лол жесть’ etc. Basically depends on the context

[omnipotent]

Spam

Hmm, so is that applicable to the canned meat substance (I've never had it--I may be bougie but certain things simply should not be canned), or to the term used for unwanted emails, or both? I guess everyone else would just wisely call the unwanted emails "junk emails"?

[dorchadas]

The international version is the term for junk emails. It's スパム in Japanese and ספאם in Hebrew (both transliterated from English), though as you predicted, Hebrew also uses דואר זבל doar zevel, "junk email".

[symbioid]

Oh! Firgun is like what we poly folks tend to call Compersion!f I think I knew Mudita from Buddhist studies, but never put the two together!

"Fortnight" now is making me think of numbers, and how India uses Lakh/Crore which, yeah, we have 100,000 or 10 million. but not a single unit of such.

[dorchadas]

Huh, that number thing makes me wonder! English counts by thousands, and Hindi by 100,000, and Japanese by 10,000 (10,000 is 万, 100,000,000 is 億). I wonder what determines that?

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I would say, it's not just about having a word with no direct equivalent. It's more about having a concept that speakers of the target language don't commonly use and can't easily understand. Consider the Jahai vocabulary for smells. English is nowhere near that good, and most English speakers don't have fluent noses. The words are hard to translate, not just because English doesn't have near as good a smell vocabulary, but because English speakers aren't concerned enough about smells to be good at distinguishing them. I am fluent with smells, and even I don't feel that I have a firm grasp on exactly what those words mean.

Sometimes it's also about figuring out where a concept is coming from. You tell an English speaker that "glas" can mean blue or green or gray, occasionally also black or silver, and they will tend to think it is useless as a color word. Tell them it means "sea-colored" and then they get it, because the sea can be all of those colors.

Other times you run into a problem because one language has concepts welded together in a way the other language doesn't, or actively rules out. Most modern Americans would find their minds struggling to hold onto a word that meant both "fat" and "attractive." They can grasp the idea of something like tits and ass being large and therefore sexy, but not fat in general. Same with Muslims or Jews and words from languages where pigs are sacred. It's like saying dry water. And most languages have things like that.

So it's really about finding the frame, the box a word draws around some portion of reality. Sometimes that's easy, especially if both languages have similar boxes. Other times it's difficult or impossible.