More specifically, a person with a guaranteed sub-optimal strategy for iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
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farfegnugen - the experience of riding in, driving, or owning a car with excellent mechanical engineering and piss poor electrical engineering.
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Ha!
I had an 80s Rabbit where the passenger side taillight burned out at about 5x the rate of the one on the driver’s side, and where the (analogue) dash clock stopped one day, stayed dead for about 5 years, then started up again and worked for the rest of the car’s life…
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There’s one english word which is incredibly untranslatable to large parts of the world:
“the”
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We didn’t have one; but thanks to NATO STANAGs, we were able to obtain an interoperable one from the French with minimal delay…
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Not a professional translator myself but my wife is and I often end up as a “consultant” for English to Japanese texts. Some words or ideas really don’t “translate” in that you have to maintain flow and/or character voice and you can’t really use several sentences in substitute of one word. Or sometimes the concept/word just doesn’t exist in the other language or you can’t find a close enough substitute due to connotation.
I’ve also encountered this problem with English to Japanese business documents. For example I work with information security policy & procedure documents and often enough the usual Japanese analog does not actually mean the same thing so you have to express the concept otherwise or add lots of extra text to express the meaning of the original document.
Finally, there’s lots of Hebrew where the usual English translation is too far from the original meaning so to have a meaningful conversation in English, you either have to just use the original words or constantly footnote/over explain.
Anyway, lists like this are useful in the sense that they get some folks to think about how different languages than their mother tongue work or possibly to simply realize not all languages work 100% the same.
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That one was particularly funny because they actually translated it into a single English word in the description. Whether or not “threefill” was a word before they wrote that piece is irrelevant. That’s a word now. That’s how English works.
Speaking of how English works, there is also the fact that if any of these words express useful concepts to English speakers then we have a translation of them already. For example, I have an English word for kilig (the feeling of butterflies in your stomach) - it’s “kilig.” Welcome to English!
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Like I said above about “au”, I bet the words that are absolutely untranslatable are largely prepositions. Articles probably get in there too. These are root concepts that are so deeply embedded that we hardly even know what we mean by them.
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I’d love to be pedantic about this comment and say that surely such a word exists already but I’ll be damned if I can think of one.
Instead I’ll suggest we call such people ‘furtlers’ from now on.
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“Untranslatable” is mistaken, but I think Beschizza has a point. Given a concept, you can always find words to express that concept. But how do you intuit a concept without encountering it in some way?
In an online argument I was having elsewhere, I remember posting a link to an RFC on email – the official document that defines the standard for what an email is. I was trying to make the point that the definition of email is only useful if you already know what email is. (The person I was arguing with didn’t understand my point.)
If a word - or an idiomatic phrase - exists, the concept is already known to the listener.
The explanations given in the images are not translations because they introduce a new concept (or a new variation of existing concepts) and will thus require a different kind of mental effort to understand - in short, it will feel differently.
The mere existence of a word in a language creates a culture where it can be taken for granted that certain concept is widely known.
Imagine a child exhibiting just a little bit too much Schadenfreude in some situation. I might say to the child, “You should not feel so happy about other people’s bad fortune.” Simple, and direct. And a bit too strong for mild cases.
In German (and, apparently, in future English), I’d be able to re-use the “bottled” concept of Schadenfreude. I might forego the direct rebuke and say “Schadenfreude ist die schönste Freude, gel?” - literally “Schadenfreude is the best kind of joy, isn’t it?”
I’d just be stating the fact that the temptation is there, leaving the rest to be inferred. This wouldn’t work if I needed more than one or two words to define what I was talking about.
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Strangely enough, I think you missed my point, but that’s the internet for you.
You seem to have redefined “translatable” to include “grammatically equivalent” — why is that a requirement? And I’m not sure why you’re hung up on natsukashii: how about “How nostalgic!” or “This takes me back!” or “My old favorite toy!” You may say these don’t cover exactly the same semantic ground as “Natsukashii!” but my point is that no translation does. “Oishii!” isn’t exactly “Yum!” because yum, for example, has a different register and you probably wouldn’t say “Yum!” to your boss, among other differences.
So if no two words cover exactly the same semantic territory between languages, what is meant by “untranslatable”?
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“dappled” light:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=dappled+light&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=W6shVKPwGrOTsQTYy4LIBQ&ved=0CCIQsAQ&biw=1871&bih=1076
I love the Japanese (Nihongo) word Kokoro. It can be translated as “heart, mind, spirit” --one concept.
If you wish to describe a person, you can say "anatta-no (your) kokoro-wa ii (good) desu (It is)
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The English word is “voter.”
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Edsel was significant all right, a significant failure.
@greggman: TIL a pretty awesome Japanese word. Arigato!
Lapflaps, those little flyer inserts that fall out of magazines.
Ignisecond, the interval between locking your car door and realizing that you left it running with the keys in the ignition.
Reintarnation, being reborn as a hillbilly.
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The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary…
James Nicoll
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Ugh, freakin’ “doch.” I remember being part of an entire college class that was mystified by that word, and our otherwise-excellent T.A. being unable to explain it to our satisfaction.
道 is another good one. Could be road, path, way of thinking, system of living or even some other more esoteric meanings.
