English words that are not easily translated (what's the English version of hygge?)

[fdrinca]

I'm not googling the right words to find the answers I'm looking for, so to the Hive I turn:

 

I'm wondering what English words are not simply translated into other languages, much as words like "hygge" require several words to get the full meaning. 

 

The only words DH and I have brainstormed are not nearly as inspiring as hygge. We stalled out after "fleek."

[diplomum]

I think many, many English words are hard to translate. Because we absorbed words from various sources (Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Greek, Celtic etc.) we often have several words with nuanced meanings. Those nuances are sometimes very hard to translate into a language with only one or two words for the same thing. Laugh, giggle, guffaw, titter. Chew, chomp, jaw, masticate, gnaw. Those are off the top of my head and I'm only one coffee in this morning so they are probably terrible examples!

[gardenmom5]

goody.

 

a missionary mom groups I was on recommended to put this on the outside of packages going to certain south american/eastern-european and asian countries.  it doesn't translate, and they have no idea what it means.  that means - the item gets through and isn't' stolen.

 

eta: goody is a colloquialism, they are generally harder to translate.

Edited January 3, 2017 by gardenmom5

[Rosie_0801]

My Cantonese speaking friend at school had to be given a definition of junk, so maybe Cantonese doesn't have a word for junk?

[Laura Corin]

My Cantonese speaking friend at school had to be given a definition of junk, so maybe Cantonese doesn't have a word for junk?

 

Junk in what sense?  There's definitely a Cantonese word for rubbish.

 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9E%83%E5%9C%BE

 

ETA: I believe that the word 'junk' meaning boat is actually Malay.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Laura Corin

[Rosie_0801]

Junk in what sense?  There's definitely a Cantonese word for rubbish.

 

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9E%83%E5%9C%BE

 

ETA: I believe that the word 'junk' meaning boat is actually Malay.

 

Junk in the sense of useless stuff you keep in your house, that definitely shouldn't be thrown away because it isn't rubbish.

[Laura Corin]

Junk in the sense of useless stuff you keep in your house, that definitely shouldn't be thrown away because it isn't rubbish.

 

Did she grow up in Australia?  I'm just wondering if she wasn't familiar with that particular usage because she was taught a different form of English.  That's not how I would use the word.

 

ETA: in Mandarin, I would use a phrase that means 'bits and pieces things' for your definition of junk - I don't know if Cantonese would do the same.

Edited January 3, 2017 by Laura Corin

[Rosie_0801]

Did she grow up in Australia?  I'm just wondering if she wasn't familiar with that particular usage because she was taught a different form of English.  That's not how I would use the word.

 

ETA: in Mandarin, I would use a phrase that means 'bits and pieces things' for your definition of junk - I don't know if Cantonese would do the same.

 

No, she'd only just moved here from Hong Kong.

[Laura Corin]

No, she'd only just moved here from Hong Kong.

 

It could be a British/Australian thing.

 

I remember a British friend who had a student telling a story about a 'male man'.  She wrote the words up on the board and explained why you didn't need to say 'male', even though 'man' was sometimes used to mean 'mankind'.  The student looked puzzled, as did the rest of the class.  After much confusion, it turned out that he was saying 'mailman' and had learned English from an American textbook. 

Edited January 3, 2017 by Laura Corin

[Rosie_0801]

It could be a British/Australian thing.

 

I remember a British friend who had a student telling a story about a 'male man'.  She wrote the words up on the board and explained why you didn't need to say 'male', even though 'man' was sometimes used to mean 'mankind'.  The student looked puzzled, as did the rest of the class.  After much confusion, it turned out that he was saying 'mailman' and had learned English from an American textbook. 

 

I can relate.

 

I nearly dropped my teeth when my younger Polish cousin used the word "arse." Of course she learned English by watching a whole lot of American movies, and "ass" isn't as bad in that dialect as "arse" is in mine.

[Laura Corin]

I remember having a hard time translating the word 'privacy' when I first lived in China.  China was still a place with serious surveillance at the time, and I felt as if 'privacy' was tinged with being illicit.  I could have just been explaining it badly though.  There must be a lot more words that were hard to translate, but I can't think of any.  

There were a few words that we used in Chinese even when we were speaking English.  One was 'man man lai', which translates as 'take it easy', but it has a bit more forward movement than the English phrase necessarily implies.

 

On another note, one of my colleagues is involved in a project to standardise Chinese translation of Western philosophical terms.  Precision is important, and not every author is using the same Chinese word to denote a particular term in English, German, or whatever.  

[Rosie_0801]

Translating into signed languages is fun. There are some things you can't talk about unless you know what they look like.

[Laura Corin]

Translating into signed languages is fun. There are some things you can't talk about unless you know what they look like.

 

Example?

[Rosie_0801]

Example?

 

Geothermal power. :lol:

 

I needed to have a rough idea on how the different machine parts looked and connected. You can't sign "and it flows from here to here" using words in a natural signed language. You have to show it, like a charades game.

[Rosie_0801]

You can't even talk about taking something out of the fridge and putting it on the bench without showing where the fridge and bench are.

 

It's pretty cool.

[Laura Corin]

You can't even talk about taking something out of the fridge and putting it on the bench without showing where the fridge and bench are.

 

It's pretty cool.

 

I'd not thought about that.  So for 'geothermal power' there isn't a set group of signs (by convention)?  It's a flow through the concepts?

[Rosie_0801]

I'd not thought about that.  So for 'geothermal power' there isn't a set group of signs (by convention)?  It's a flow through the concepts?

 

There's no sign for geothermal power, though you could finger spell it and use a few signs to explain what it means. To talk about how it works, you have to show the way the parts connect. 

[Laura Corin]

There's no sign for geothermal power, though you could finger spell it and use a few signs to explain what it means. To talk about how it works, you have to show the way the parts connect. 

 

So in English I could talk vaguely about the heat being collected from the earth and fed into a heating system, but in sign language you would have to be much more specific?

[Rosie_0801]

One thing they said in Auslan linguistics class is that different languages prioritise or value different information. With signed languages, obviously location is important. In English, they said, time is important- when whatever it was happened. I don't know how to think about whether that is true or not. I know, personally, I can't file anecdotes about people I don't know in my head unless I know how they know them, even though I can't see a reason why it matters because I don't know them.

[Rosie_0801]

So in English I could talk vaguely about the heat being collected from the earth and fed into a heating system, but in sign language you would have to be much more specific?

 

Much more specific. A non-natural signed language might say something like heat+collect+from+ground+make+electricity, but non-natural signed languages are mind numbingly dull to watch for those kinds of reasons.

[wintermom]

I'm not googling the right words to find the answers I'm looking for, so to the Hive I turn:

 

I'm wondering what English words are not simply translated into other languages, much as words like "hygge" require several words to get the full meaning. 

 

The only words DH and I have brainstormed are not nearly as inspiring as hygge. We stalled out after "fleek."

 

Language and culture are strongly linked. More isolated or smaller cultures will have more "specialized" vocabulary as well. Scandinavian terms, like "hygge" don't tend to become borrowed by other cultures outside their own, but Denmark, Norway and Iceland do use this term in the same way. If you look historically at these cultures and languages, they have strong ties. 

 

Look at all the modern technology terms in English, and you'll find that most languages don't bother translating them, they just use them as-is in their own language (e.g., "google"). This again is linked with culture. Most cultures use similar computer technologies, and the new terms have pretty much equal meaning where ever they occur. To look up things on Google in Denmark is exactly the same as looking them up in the US. No real need for a different term. 

[raptor_dad]

Neil Stephenson riffs on this idea in "Anathem".

 

 

"Please supply a definition of the oft-used Fluccish[English] word creepy," said Fraa Jad.

I tried to explain it to the Thousander, but primitive emotional states were not what Orth[Latin] was good at.

":An intuition of the numenous," Fraa Jad hazarded, "combined with a sense of dread."

"Dread is a strong word, but you are close."

 

Interestingly, other common examples like hygge and schadenfreude also refer to slippery primitive emotional states.

 

ETA: Fey might be another good one... I could see translations into European languages, but the whole thing is so culture bound wider translations are likely to have different connotations.

Edited January 3, 2017 by raptor_dad

[Farrar]

A friend who does ASL translation professionally was saying how she has to keep up with new signs because they're always being changed up for very specific vocabulary - especially around politics and political figures, which I thought was interesting. She was explaining about a debate about how to sign Trump's name.

 

Laura, I never succeeded in explaining privacy the entire time I was in China... in English or Chinese. Sigh.

[Farrar]

A friend who lived in Japan for a long time is always posting about Japanese words we need. There are a ton of articles. Like these:

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/irusu-for-life?utm_term=.ejgzxRpzn#.mcD032Y0p

 

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/11-beautiful-untranslatable-japanese-words

 

Wasi-Sabi is one - like hygge - that has filtered into American culture to some extent. I really like otsukaresama - you're tired, but good for you for working so hard, I totally appreciate it.

[Farrar]

One more list of words relevant to this conversation:

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/20/english-translation-words_n_4790396.html

[scrapbookbuzz]

I've always been fascinated by language and thus, in a previous decade became a linguist, so this thread completely fascinates me.

Math, from pre-Algebra going forward makes no sense to me. Language I get!

[Rosie_0801]

A friend who does ASL translation professionally was saying how she has to keep up with new signs because they're always being changed up for very specific vocabulary - especially around politics and political figures, which I thought was interesting. She was explaining about a debate about how to sign Trump's name.

 

I'd love to see that! Deaf humour can be... irreverent...

[regentrude]

sophisticated 

to be supposed to (do something)

 

have no equivalent in German

There are more I have noticed, but can't recall right now. We talk about this every now and then.

("hygge" does have a German equivalent))

Edited January 3, 2017 by regentrude

[Rosie_0801]

What? !! I thought German had a word for everything!

 

Does German have a word for the feeling you have when you buy someone else a prettier volume of a book than your own?

 

I think someone should have a word for this.

[regentrude]

What? !! I thought German had a word for everything!

 

No, you can probably express everything in German, but not as concise as in English.

[Bluegoat]

I think maybe what is tricky is that it's rather difficvult to know for sure that an equivalent can't be found in ANY other language.  Whereas it's probably the case that many other languages have one or more words that can't be directly translated into English.

 

Being curious, I googled this and found a few lists of English words that are supposedly difficult to translate into most other languages:

 

kitsch (though this seems to me to be borrowed from German, though perhaps it doesn't have the same implications?)

facepalm

gobbledygook

serendipity

whimsy

chuffed

poppycock

 

 

[regentrude]

kitsch (though this seems to me to be borrowed from German, though perhaps it doesn't have the same implications?)

 

It is a German word, and it means in German exactly the same thing it does in English:

"art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way."

[Lady Florida.]

Junk in the sense of useless stuff you keep in your house, that definitely shouldn't be thrown away because it isn't rubbish.

 

 

Did she grow up in Australia?  I'm just wondering if she wasn't familiar with that particular usage because she was taught a different form of English.  That's not how I would use the word.

 

As a speaker of American English I use the word the same way as Rosie. 

 

It has quite a few meanings though. It's all in the context. It can mean trash, or bits of things, or useless stuff that you don't throw away. It can refer to male private parts. Use it as an adjective with the word food, and junk food means food with little to no nutritional value (think fast food like McDonald's)

 

Ooh, Merriam Webster will tell you all about it. 

 

So if one translates the word, I think its counterpart in the other language would depend on how it's being used.

[Bluegoat]

 

 

As a speaker of American English I use the word the same way as Rosie. 

 

It has quite a few meanings though. It's all in the context. It can mean trash, or bits of things, or useless stuff that you don't throw away. It can refer to male private parts. Use it as an adjective with the word food, and junk food means food with little to no nutritional value (think fast food like McDonald's)

 

Ooh, Merriam Webster will tell you all about it. 

 

So if one translates the word, I think its counterpart in the other language would depend on how it's being used.

 

Yes, and sometimes I think that is what causes the issue, especially I suspect for humour. 

[Bluegoat]

It is a German word, and it means in German exactly the same thing it does in English:

"art, objects, or design considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality, but sometimes appreciated in an ironic or knowing way."

 

Yeah, I wondered.  Perhaps the romance languages don't have it - they might all be too tasteful.