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Does Not Translate

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Re: Does Not Translate

#71

Post by throwaway98700k »

awb wrote: post #67
School-Cotton wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that’s unsurprising; nobody can know every expression in any language, even their native one. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/joie%20de%20vivre

Surprising to me. I’m an avid reader of books and news and movie watcher and I’ve never heard this phrase once. I also took 3 years of French, went to a 4 year college and I’ve reviewed lists of foreign phrases commonly used in English with my kids, all while somehow dodging this phrase for ~40 years!

It’s as common as je ne sais quoi or deja vu or ennui.

This one’s on you. Here’s a helpful list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_French_expressio...

Re: Does Not Translate

#72

Post by tremon »

wbsss4412 wrote: post #7
NylaTheWolf wrote: post #3

Earlier 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.

Rather, it literally translates as "I want you", and is often used in the romantic sense more than "te amo". My impression is that "amor" in Spanish isn't as single-mindedly restricted to love interests as it is in English: amor/amar is used for close friends and relatives as well.

Re: Does Not Translate

#73

Post by dmitriid »

jng wrote: post #24
lupire wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"te quiero" = "i adore you"

Not really. "I adore you" is literally "te adoro". "Querer" in Spanish just means "to love", it's a synonym to "amar", also "to love". "Querer" is more common language and applied non-romantically all the time, and "amar" is more poetic and veers more towards romantic love, but they both mean the same. BTW, "querer" means "to want", but when it is used to convey love (easy to tell by context), it doesn't ring of obje…

> "Querer" is more common language and applied non-romantically all the time, and "amar" is more poetic and veers more towards romantic love, but they both mean the same.

It's interesting from the point of view of English and Russian. When we tal about people:

- In English `love` can be used for both romantic and non-romantic love.

- In Russian `love` (especially nowadays) feels to be almost exclusively either romantic or family-related (love between parent-child, between siblings etc.). You can't really tell your friend you love them :) It's weird

Re: Does Not Translate

#74

Post by dghf »

tyingq wrote: post #25
anthk wrote: post #18

>Ish - a suffix that softens the exactness of an adjective. Spanish -eico, -izo... >Paragrafryttare. A person who follows written rules to such a degree that they're seen as rigid and inflexible. Tiquismiquis. >Cornuto. To have horns, meaning that you (or a particular person) has been cheated on by their spouse or significant other. Same in Spanish, cornudo. >A pop song released around spring that gets overplayed dur…

>Paragrafryttare. A person who follows written rules to such a degree that they're seen as rigid and inflexible Stickler seems to work in English.

Or jobsworth.

Re: Does Not Translate

#76

Post by wunderlust »

Just because a word doesn't have a 1-to-1 correlation with a word in another language doesn't mean it's not translatable; in fact, this website shows that they are translatable. Even more, it's not analytically true that any word in one language shares a perfect mapping with a word in another language. This is evident when you translate a word into another language and back into the native language and find yourself with a different (albeit perhaps related) word.

W.V.O. Quine made some remarkable points about translation [1], although not all philosophers (cf. John Searle) agree that the scenarios he suggested are as problematic as he contended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation

Re: Does Not Translate

#77

Post by PeterWhittaker »

I was surprised that the Turkish “huzun” was omitted. As I understand it, from reading Orhan Pamuk, for an Istanbouli it essentially means the despair of living in a city that was for more than a millennia the capital of the world and never again will achieve those heights.

Re: Does Not Translate

#78

Post by wunderlust »

vidarh wrote: post #60
akavi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Schadenfreude"'s English translation is "schadenfreude".

Or "glee". Glee is just much broader, but given the right context it's a fine synonym.

This seems problematic. "Given the right context" a lot of words could be synonyms. It seems like it's implicit in the meaning of "synonymous" that two words share the same meaning if they're interchangeable (in their respective languages) in all contexts.

Re: Does Not Translate

#79

Post by wbsss4412 »

tremon wrote: post #72
wbsss4412 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rather, it literally translates as "I want you", and is often used in the romantic sense more than "te amo". My impression is that "amor" in Spanish isn't as single-mindedly restricted to love interests as it is in English: amor/amar is used for close friends and relatives as well.

Querer is also used for non romantic relationships.

Source: direct first hand experience.

Re: Does Not Translate

#80

Post by ithkuil »

awb wrote: post #61
School-Cotton wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, a lot of the French ones, like “joie de vivre”, have been borrowed into English verbatim. “Joie de vivre” is indeed translatable into English, and the translation is just “joie de vivre”. To claim otherwise would be like saying that the concept of chile pepper can only be expressed in Nahuatl.

> “Joie de vivre” is indeed translatable into English, and the translation is just “joie de vivre”. I’m a native English speaker and I’ve never heard of the expression “Joie de vivre”, so I don’t understand how “Joie de vivre” is the English translation of “Joie de vivre”.

Yeah, it's such a cliché. Using too many foreign words is such a faux pas, it reveals the bourgeois character of the speaker. No no no, a real connoisseur of the English language won't have such a lassaiz-faire attitude and accept just any fancy word du jour. That would be so gauche indeed. Au contraire I'm blasé at such attempts. The real English entrepreneurial avant-garde clique has so many choices a la carte, so much joi de vivere in this je ne sais qua of a deja vu. Touché
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