Appendix:Terms considered difficult or impossible to translate into English
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This index contains terms that are considered “untranslatable”, meaning difficult or impossible to translate directly into an English equivalent.
Terms without an English equivalent
| Term | Meaning | Language | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| afturbatapíka | An unmarried woman or girl who has had a child, which has however since been forgotten, resulting in her being considered a virgin again. | Icelandic | Literally "convalescent virgin". |
| alpeggiare | To pasture or stay in Alpine meadows in the summer. | Italian | |
| cafuné | The act of fondling someone's hair or scalp. | Portuguese (in Brazil) | |
| coisar | To do anything (placeholder for any unrecalled verb). | Portuguese | |
| онади (onadi), онакви (onakvi) | Macedonian | Verb from она (ona, “it”) | |
| color cane che fugge | A nonspecific or nameless color. (English does not have a clear equivalent; sometimes sky-blue pink is used without particular meaning, but it also specifies a real (spectrum of) color the sky sometimes turns; similarly, reddish-green is sometimes used in philosophy as a nonsensical or impossible color, but it also specifies a real color some plants have.) | Italian | Literally “color of a dog that flees”. |
| color de gos com fuig | Catalan | ||
| color de perro que huye | Spanish | ||
| cor de burro quando foge | Portuguese | Literally “color of a donkey when it flees”. | |
| chuva de molhar bobo | A rain that seems light enough for people to walk around in without getting wet, fooling those who do into getting soaked; alternatively, a rain that falls before those walking around expected it to come, soaking those who foolishly went out without an umbrella. | Portuguese (in Brazil) | Literally “fool-wetting rain”. |
| chuva molha-tolos | Portuguese (in Portugal) | ||
| fensterln | To visit a girl who is the object of one's affections at night, either by coming to her window or by climbing through it into her room. | Bavarian, German | |
| hantâ | A verb used in the imperative to announce a dead zebra, whether killed or found. | Hadza | As the verb is imperative, its form changes depending on the number and sex of the people being addressed. There are a number of such words for different kinds of animal. |
| hiraeth | A deep feeling of yearning or longing for something, someone or somewhere; especially for Wales or Welsh culture. | Welsh | |
| Kummerspeck | Excess weight gained as a result of stress-related eating. | German | Literally “grief-fat”. |
| plʔɛŋ | To have a blood-like smell that attracts tigers and leopards. | Jehai | Used to describe crushed head lice; the blood of most rodents (including squirrels) and civets, gibbons, and some other animals; cooked wild lemongrass; and stagnant water (e.g. in bamboo stems). Contrasted with e.g. pʔih, which is to have a blood-like smell like raw meat or fish. |
| saudade, soidade | The feeling of missing something or someone. Approximate to longing. | Galician | |
| saudade | Portuguese | ||
| saudade | Spanish | ||
| دلتنگی (deltangi) | Persian | ||
| شَوْق (šawq) / اِشْتِيَاق (ištiyāq) | Arabic | ||
| Sitzriese | A person who appears tall when seated but short when standing. | German | Literally “sit-giant”. |
| Sitzzwerg | A person who appears short when seated but tall when standing. | German | Literally “sit-dwarf”. |
| skämskudde | A real or imagined pillow one hides behind when experiencing vicarious embarrassment due to watching something embarrassing. | Swedish | |
| vetja | Used as a filler after bringing forth an idea or suggestion. | Swedish | Literally "I know". |
| vitja nafns | To appear in the dream of a pregnant woman and suggest a name for her child. | Icelandic | Literally "to visit a name" or "to visit for a name". This action is usually done by dead relatives. It is sometimes considered bad luck for the parents to not honor this request. |
| почему́чка (počemúčka) | A person, often a child, who asks a lot of questions, especially “why” questions. | Russian | From почему́ (počemú, “why”). The term gained currency in English after it was named #9 in a BBC list of the top 10 most difficult words (in any language) to translate.[1] |
| غیرت (ğeyrat) | The desire to control female members of the family and protect them from unwanted sexual attention. | Persian, etc. | Also borrowed into other languages. |
| 猫舌 (nekojita) | A person who can't eat or drink anything hot (at a high temperature) until it cools, due to having an overly sensitive tongue. | Japanese | Literally “cat-tongue”. |
| 渋い (shibui) | Having a simple, subtle, and unobtrusive beauty (see also Shibui on Wikipedia). | Japanese | |
| 積ん読 (tsundoku) | The act of buying a book and leaving it, unread, piled up with other unread books. | Japanese | A kind of visual pun on the verb phrase 積んで置く (tsunde oku, literally “to pile up and leave something”). This use of oku is quite common, and the -e oku verb combination commonly contracts in fast or informal speech into just -oku: tsunde oku → tsundoku. The doku portion was then spelled with 読 (“to read, reading”), which is read as doku in Sinoxenic compounds, to allude to books as the object of the action. |
| 失獨 / 失独 (shīdú) | (Of parents) to lose their only child, but being unable to have another due to old age or government policy. | Chinese | Literally “lose only”. |
| حُلِیَہ (huliya) | A person's style or characteristics, or more strictly their countenance | Urdu | |
| نِعْمُ البَدَل (ni’mu lbadal) | A better substitute following the loss of something – including lives and possessions. | Urdu | Literally "the exchange of blessings". |
| عِیادَت ('iyādat) | Enquiring or visiting of a friend or a family member who is either ill or admitted to hospital as a patient. | Urdu |
References
- ^ Fiona Macdonald (2014 December 6) “Lost in Translation: Words with incredible meanings”, in BBC