A lexical gap or lacuna is an absence of a word in a particular language. Types of lexical gaps include untranslatability (when a distinct concept in another language does not have a distinct word in the language in question) and accidental gaps (missing inflections or other variants which might logically be expected to exist via the ordinary rules of the language).
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Often a concept lexicalized in one language does not have a corresponding lexical unit in another language and thus presents a translation difficulty. Circumlocution, a descriptive phrase, must be used instead, or possibly even multiple phrases used in varying situations. For example, Romanian lacks the word "shallow". Therefore, "shallow waters" is mainly translated as "ape puţin adânci" ("not so deep waters") or "apă mică" ("small water") in TV subtitles.
In most languages, if the missing concept is important or must be cited often, borrowing from one language and adding to another may occur.
This case should not be confused with translation into a different type of lexical unit. For example, a simple word may be translated as a compound or a collocation, as in the cases of the Russian word "bosoy", which is translated as the compound "barefoot" in English, and the English word "private" (in the sense of a military rank), which is "soldato semplice" in Italian.
An abundant source of lexical gaps used to be a contact of primitive cultures with more advanced civilizations. For example, the Russian ethnographer Miklukho-Maklai, famous for his study of the aborigines of New Guinea, recorded that Papuans, who have never seen an ox, gave the animal a name back-translated as "a huge pig with teeth on the forehead".[1]
Sometimes a certain inflection of a word produces a word phonetically forbidden or awkward in a given language. For example the Russian word dno in the meaning of bottom (of a river) does not have a plural form. In the meaning "the bottom of a barrel" the plural is donya (дно->донья).