Does Not Translate
doesnottranslate.com
Does Not Translate
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Re: Does Not Translate
#2Interesting, but the premise is nonsense. Obviously these phrases and words do translate. They are translated on the page, into English.
Re: Does Not Translate
#3Interesting, but the premise is nonsense. Obviously these phrases and words do translate. They are translated on the page, into English.
I think they meant it doesn't have an exact one word equivalent.
Re: Does Not Translate
#4This is actually a pretty awesome resource! It was pretty interesting to see "-ish" on there. It never occurred to me that there's likely not an exact equivalent to "-ish" in other languages.
Re: Does Not Translate
#5Interesting, but the premise is nonsense. Obviously these phrases and words do translate. They are translated on the page, into English.
Oh, don't be dull ;) the explanation when selecting a language:
> Concepts in Swedish That are difficult to easily and directly translate to other languages.
Of course you can explain the concept in English, but you couldn't replace it with a simple translation when used in a sentence. Of course it's just a matter of degree since most words have slightly different connotations in different languages, but I found the lists entertaining and insightful.
The quality of the entries vary, of course, but that's not an issue with the premise…
Re: Does Not Translate
#6Interesting, but the premise is nonsense. Obviously these phrases and words do translate. They are translated on the page, into English.
I think they meant it doesn't have an exact one word equivalent.
I can see some words on there that do have a one word equivalent, or is it that the equivalencies can't express the concept but also have other meanings as well.
I wonder if that wouldn't be the actual rare words, not just words that translate, but in which all the meanings of a word in translating language are the same as the meanings of the word in the target language.
on edit: consider Hov in Danish which the page says does not translate, but I think in English Whoa can handle all permutations of Hov, but I don't think Hov really handles the Keanu Reaves type of Whoa. Thus Hov can translate to English, but Whoa cannot translate to Danish by this kind of strict translation.
But if we just accept that the most common meaning of a word a needs to translate then Hov and Whoa can both translate to each other, IMHO.
Re: Does Not Translate
#7Interesting, but the premise is nonsense. Obviously these phrases and words do translate. They are translated on the page, into English.
I think they meant it doesn't have an exact one word equivalent.
Or they are simply giving the closest possible translation.
They list “te quiero” as meaning “I love you but not quite. Which is a mistranslation. It literally translates as “I love you”. But at the same time you have “te amo”, which also translates to “I love you” yet they are two different phrases with different meanings.
Re: Does Not Translate
#8TIL there's no English word for "to speak among Esperantists in a language besides Esperanto", although I'm not sure one is needed either.
Re: Does Not Translate
#9This is actually a pretty awesome resource! It was pretty interesting to see "-ish" on there. It never occurred to me that there's likely not an exact equivalent to "-ish" in other languages.
If you click to the reddit thread for that word, people mention translations in various languages.
I saw this shared on reddit a few days ago, it's a cool idea but the actual words... there exist very few that are actually untranslateable. If you know more than one or two languages, you probably spot some of them pretty fast. (It's funny you mention specifically -ish, that's one of the words I was skeptical about and clicked through to the thread on, and thus knew that people in the thread mentioned various translations.)
Re: Does Not Translate
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they meant it doesn't have an exact one word equivalent.
Or they are simply giving the closest possible translation. They list “te quiero” as meaning “I love you but not quite. Which is a mistranslation. It literally translates as “I love you”. But at the same time you have “te amo”, which also translates to “I love you” yet they are two different phrases with different meanings.
"te quiero" = "i adore you"