Talk:Words hardest to translate

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[edit] Getting rid of Today's Translation's word list

I removed Today's Translation's list from this article. We can incoporate some of their words into this article. But their list is not "THE LIST". Their list is just a list. Any translator can compile such a list. -- Toytoy 18:59, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)

Then why removing it and not using it as starting point for our own list? -- till we ☼☽ | Talk 09:01, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
If any word in Today's Translation's list is correct and usable, its native speaker will put it in this list, with an insightful explaination. Since certain words in this list has been proven mistake or hoax, I'd rather let native or skillful speakers to decide which one to use. -- Toytoy 01:35, Sep 21, 2004 (UTC)
I agree with Toytoy, this list is of very dubious value anyway, at least two words appearing on it have been proven to be wrong. No point in propagating this urban myth.--Roo72 09:22, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Without some verifiable list to build from, this article becomes inherently POV and its contents become impossible to verify. For example, I could add a section about a Sami word "grüüsmötlef", which means "kinda depressed, but hoping for better times and healthier reindeers". Hardly anyone could verify this and even if it were a real word, it's unlikely a translator of the language in question could verify it really is a hard word to translate. I'm about to list this to VfD unless someone comes up with a brilliant vision for the contents of this article. --Farside 16:30, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)
If you invent a word of an obscure language, you're making a fool out of yourself. However, with most major languages, there are plenty of people who could do a little verification.
I speak Chinese and English. I can also read a little Japanese, French, Spanish, German and a microscopic bit of Russian. People better than I are all over this place. Even if you invent an Elbonian word, we'll possibly smell it. The first thing I'll do is to check your past contributions.
"Without some verifiable list to build from?" Experienced translators have their lists in their minds. Your lack of knowledge does not deny the existence of these words. I propose to keep this list here and let people provide promising candidates to this list. -- Toytoy 18:15, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Discussions

I think this article has to have some POV. But so far, people almost always discuss before posting anything. That's good. If you say !@#$ is very difficult to translate, someone else will challenge it. I think acceptible rules will evolve over time. -- Toytoy 18:23, Sep 20, 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

Hmmm. I have my doubts about how useful this list can be, but I'll see how it develops first. Darksun 14:46, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I hope this article could become a story-telling list with lots of short-story-like explainations. -- Toytoy 15:06, Sep 2, 2004 (UTC)

If shlimazl is hard to translate, what about shmegegge? Gzuckier 20:17, 2 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Does "Spam" on the English words list refer to the tinned meat or to unwanted email? --MockTurtle 01:16, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Well, I bet that's one part of the word what makes it hard to translate: it can mean both. --Farside 04:33, 3 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It'd be nice to know why the linguists didn't pick the Fuegian word mamihlanatapai, roughly looking at each other hoping that the other will do something that both want, but neither is willing to do. For English, I found the word spannungsbogen in Frank Herbert's Dune; presumably a German loan, it supposedly means something likethe delay between when one begins to desire something and when one tries to achieve it. thefamouseccles 23:08 07 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] German

The German word "doch" is almost impossible to translate into any language. It's used when you disagree with someone and maintain that your earlier statement (which has been contested) was in fact correct. So the argument would go: "Mongolia is a country in Asia." "Nein." "Doch! asf. In other senses it means something roughly resembling "after all", either affirmative or surprised ("Ich bin doch nicht blöd." or "das ist doch der Herr X!"). Weasel

No, it isn't untranslatable. This concept (reaffirming previous statement) is not unique to German. Consider the Finnish clitic -pa. "Mongolia is a country in Asia." "Eikä." "On+pa+s" ("It-is+doch+intensifier"). Basically, the concept is assuming there is a past statement, this statement --, or "present contradicting/reaffirming the past". --Vuo 23:22, 23 September 2005 (UTC)
  • I've always been partial to "gemütlichkeit". (A few years in München will do that to one.) Jpgordon 21:40, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)
  • It's easy to translate doch into Dutch, Weasel: simply replace the d with a t :-) Aecis 09:58, 20 May 2005 (UTC)

How 'bout "comfyness"?

A decent "Spannungsbogen" belongs into any action movie or thriller (or sci-fi...) novel. It means "curve of tension". It usually goes up, then comes the catastrophe, then it goes down again. Cheers! Weasel
Narrative arc. Rd232 23:00, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

I think you guys have missed the point - when translating, you don't search solutions for individual words, but for individual meanings. For example, German doch is generally easy to translate since it represents a basic linguistic meaning you can express in any language. The way to express it is not always the same, but the meaning stays the same. For example, "Mongolia is a country in Asia." "Nein." "Doch" -> "No it's not." "Yes it is!", "Ich bin doch nicht blöd." -> "I (really) am not stupid." and "Das ist doch der Herr X!" -> "He really is Mr. X!" Very easy. Individual words that are hard to translate are generally those that represent culturally something unique to the particular language or those that have very much information crammed in a single word. --Farside 19:07, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I find the last two rather awkward/inaccurate. Weasel
Well, neither English nor German is my mother tongue, but maybe you got my point :) --Farside 15:27, 16 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I certainly didn't mean to bully you. However, in my opinion this is not merely a problem of "can't stash it into a single English word", but the whole sentiment is missing (intranslatable) in all languages I know. Weasel
I think gemütlichkeit fits into that category. It's not just "comfyness"; there's an entire Bayrisch gestalt wrapped up into it. It's not just comfy, it's Bavarian comfy. Jpgordon 20:14, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Here's two I've found: there really isnt a word in German for convenient (angenehm, praktisch, bequem are a bit different). There doesnt seem to be a good translation for schlimm in English (the difference between Das Wetter ist schlecht and Das Wetter ist schlimm is hard to convey in English). - grubber 13:37, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)

the weather is bad / the weather is terrible seems fine (tho English understatement/attitudes to weather could complicate things - you might need to know speaker/social context etc). Rd232 22:37, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Japanese

  • Doomo-Good bye, hello, very much
  • Gambaru-Fight, do well, struggle hard
  • saa, as in saa, shirimasen.

yuri_koval 09:58, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

  • お疲れさまでした。(otsukaresama deshita) - good work, good job, thanks for getting tired and worked up

--Jondel 04:26, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Gambaru

I don't know if this Japanese word is so difficult to translate. It has multiple meanings. But when used in a sentence, it usually settles on a specific one. "Fight on!" "Word hard!" "Struggle!" "Tough it out!" To a translator, a 80% or 90% approximation is usually possible, I guess. And this word has been over-used over and over in everyday Japanese, it may have already lost some of its subtle meanings.


がん(gam)ば(ba)る(ru)【頑張る】

1.〔踏ん張る〕hold out, hang on

  • 援軍が来るまでがんばった
    • They held out [hung on] till reinforcements arrived.
  • がんばれ!
    • Stick with [to] it! / [collo.] Hang in there! / [before a test or a match] Good luck!
  • 最後までがんばるぞ
    • I'll stick it out!
  • もっとがんばらないと進級できないよ
    • If you don't work harder, you won't be able to move up to the next grade.
  • 私服が入り口に頑張っていて中に入れなかった
    • I could not get in because plainclothesmen were watching the door closely.

2. 〔主張する〕insist [on]; persist [in]

  • 彼はうそをついた覚えはないと頑張った
    • He insisted that he had not lied.

-- Toytoy 02:06, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)

It's just that when playing a basketball game, I shout 'Gambatte', but it is a bit awkward to shout equivalent 'fight on', etc.. More like 'defence' or shoot. Some Spanish speakers(Peruvians) in Japan have made it into a Spanish word(Gambaro Gambara, Gambarimos, Gambareis Gambaran, etc..)--Jondel 23:17, 20 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Yiddish

"Whaddaya think?" Weasel
Not quite - it shows up in Russian too, and in Russian it bears a wide range of meanings, such as "well," "here goes," and "eh." - IvanP
I've always thought of it as "What's new?", which has a nice cross-language onomatopoetic effect. --RoySmith 20:27, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] French

As a personnal experience, I've found "ballistic" when used metaphorically (to go ballistic at smone) to be extremely hard to translate into French.--Circeus 18:11, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Why deleted?

(cur) (last) 22:29, 10 Oct 2004 Chameleon (All valuable content in this article is now available at Translation. The rest is either hopelessly arbitrary and POV or specifically about Today Translations, who are a non-notable company.)

I don't understand, why this page is deleted without proper discussions. --Rrjanbiah 08:49, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)
See my points above; the list is inherently POV, since no-one can study, measure or quatify the "hardness" of translation of individual words. Listing "hardest words to translate" is like listing "best movies" or "most beautiful countries". I agree there wasn't a clear consensus about deletion, but I'm quite sure the VfD process would've produced the same result. --Farside 10:39, 6 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I'm not at all sure the VfD would have resulted in a delete, so I've reverted the redirect. I found this page by starting at Plenipotentiary, which linked to here, redirected to translation. This left me totally befuddled, not having any clue what this mysterious list of hardest words to translate was, who made the list, etc. It took me quite a while to figure out all that information was here, hidden by the redirect. I agree that this article may not be the best written, but saying that "All valuable content in this article is now available at Translation" is absurd. If you think this article really should be deleted, put it on VfD and let the process take its course. --RoySmith 02:16, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC).

[edit] Space Cadet?

I was just having a conversation with a Russian friend of mine. English is his second language; he's pretty fluent, but has troubles with idioms and slang. I used the term "space cadet" to describe somebody, and he had never heard the term before. I couldn't think of a good way to translate it. --RoySmith 01:46, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Arabic altahmam

Hans Wehr's Arabic-English Dictionary (4th ed.) doesn't mention the word specifically, but the root ّهم hamma shows a primary meaning 'to disquiet, make uneasy, fill with anxiety, distress, grieve (someone)', and its derivations include the meanings 'grave', 'important', 'anxious', 'heavy', and so on. The kind of sadness referred to here is probably an anxious type of worry. In psychiatry, depression and anxiety often go hand in hand.

Arabic word forms prefixed by ta-, such as this one (al- is the definite article 'the'), are generally nouns referring to the action or state of the verb itself. -- LudwigVan 06:33, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Table the list?

Isn't a table easier to read than the list? I tried to make one myself, but I don't know how good it is... Jotomicron | (talk) 00:38, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

  • I like it! - grubber 07:49, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)

[edit] Improvement needed

Ok, I regret to say I have quite a lot beef with this:

This article needs to be moved to list of words considered the hardest to translate (or something like it) or merged with translation somehow. The references to Today Translators needs to be toned down drastically and other sources used. It's interesting to some extent, but as of now, I fail to see how it could possibly be considered encyclopedic. I would personally opt that we moved the material worth keeping to other articles and make this a list or something.

Peter Isotalo July 5, 2005 15:08 (UTC)


[edit] on improvement needed

Where it says on this page, "Clicking in a crucifix (†) " should be just "cross" since a crucifix shows Jesus on the cross, and the user clicks ON it, not IN it.

BTW - another word that doesn't translate without a lot of explanation is the Nepalese "paryo" (or "paryo" depending your transliteration). Paryo is a verb past tense form and is used to refer (even in the present, however) to rain falling (e.g., pani paryo), to ask about the cost of something (e.g, kati paryo), misfortune (dukha parayo), and other seemingly unrelated things. I don't know what the infinitive form is but the best I can deduce is perhaps parnu - "to befall."

MeBe July 26, 2005

That little cross or "crucifix" is technically known as a dagger. FuzzyOnion 18:01, August 2, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Old Cleanup Archive

Taken from the old Cleanup entry…Archived by HopeSeekr of xMule (Talk) 15:54, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Words hardest to translate - I fixed the grammar up a little bit and tried to organize the page, but it seems to be about two different things. First, it talks about a list of words named "Words hardest to translate," by a British company. Then later, it leaves that topic to talk about specific difficulties in translation and also a small note about certain that are easy to translate. Maybe it should be divided into two articles, one about the list and another about problems in translation. FuzzyOnion 22:49, May 15, 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merge with untranslatability

Merge useful points with untranslatability, noting Translation#Translation_problems. This would be things like the difference between challenges of translating

  1. a word which requires expert/local knowledge which the target reader does not possess (eg translating "computer" to an Ancient Egyptian)
  2. a word which carries complex layers of cultural connotations, for which no single equivalent exists which conveys all of them precisely
  3. a word which can generally be translated adequately in most contexts, but requires an understanding of the context the word is used in, and a great deal of expertise in both languages to choose correctly from the wide range of consequent possibilities.

The company's list should be dumped. It's unnecessary, controversial, unhelpful, and dangerously close to advertising. Rd232 22:48, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

An excellent idea. I may only add that the list was compiled by their own translators, hence is far from being authoritative and representative; and some choices rather show a low qualification of these folk than the translation difficulty. mikka (t) 00:12, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

Back in April, somebody unilaterally redirected this, an act to which I took umbrage and reverted. I've been watching this page since then with the hopes that it would get improved. Unfortunately, it's still rather a mess and I've slowly come to the conclusion that it's unlikely to get better. So, I'm OK with extracting the good stuff (from both the article and the talk page) and merging it into untranslatability and/or Translation. --RoySmith 00:57, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Order

With reference to "Another example for a tricky English construct would be: How would you ask a boy who has several brothers "which" (or which-th!) son of his parents he is, such that his reply would be something like: "I am the third son"? This is probably a straightforward construct in some other languages, such as Finnish and Tamil, for instance, which have an exact word for "which-th", e.g. Finnish mones."

The english usage "of what order".... Of what order are you are son to your father. Of what order is Lincoln the president of America Doctor Bruno 20:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Try monennestako, asking from (the inside of) which-th. But, the point is, that trying to translate is produces extremely complicated and awkward constructs in English, not that translation would be logically impossible. --Vuo 00:29, 30 November 2005 (UTC)