5 ms·

I've read multiple articles like this, and always find them interesting. These words, of course, can be translated to English. They just can't be translated to

• rwmj 6y ago
  Apparently "cabin fever" is difficult to translate into Japanese. My theory is that Japanese homes are so small that it's simply a fact of living there that requires little explanation.
  • bluGill 6y ago
    Small houses are not required for cabin fever.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• dntbnmpls 6y ago
  > What are some examples of English words or phrases that are so loaded with cultural significance that they are difficult to translate? There's more than one way to skin a cat. The whole nine yards. Also, there was a thread where a lot of foreigner CS students use english words because many of the words don't have direct translations or sensible translations - like mouse. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23377270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23377270
  • umvi 6y ago
    I mean, those are idioms, but they can be easily translated. "There are multiple valid solutions for a given problem"
    • xionon 6y ago
      I don’t think that’s an accurate translation at all! Skinning a cat is not a common thing. It’s not a normal food for English speakers, so the phrase carries some sense that what you’re doing is unusual. It’s usually applied to a situation completely unrelated to skinning or otherwise preparing food, so it carries some sense of absurdity. Most people using the phrase have never skinned anything, so there’s (usually!) a sense of ignorance on both sides. Your translation brings none of that. If I were to translate that idiom back to English and aim for accuracy, it would be something like, “what you’re doing is unusual, and neither of us have experience doing it, and the way you’re doing it is different than the ways I have heard of, but I suppose there’s more than one valid way to do it.” Which, I think, fits the spirit of the other examples - a very short expression that carries tons of unspoken cultural context with it, to the point that there isn’t a direct translation.
      • jrek 6y ago
        The usage of the phrase is in no way contingent on the subject activity being unusual or a lack of experience for either party, your reading of it is far too literal.
      • sethammons 6y ago
        Fwiw I’ve never read that deep into it. I have mostly experienced it as a response to a failed attempt at something and a new approach is needed. Less so, it is used to acknowledge that a problem can have alternative solutions.
      • uberman 6y ago
        The translation is as described: "There are multiple valid solutions for a given problem"
      • bigyikes 6y ago
        As a native English speaker, I personally never really thought about those implications you just described. I would use that phrase for any situation with multiple options, not just an unusual one. Maybe I’m using it wrong?
  • pseingatl 6y ago
    Proverbs are a different cultural class: "the pot calling the kettle black" in Spanish (some countries): The rabbit calling the donkey 'big ears.'
    • jaclaz 6y ago
      Only FYI, in Italian it is "Cencio dice male di straccio", vaguely translatable to "Mop speaking ill of rag". Many proverbs in different languages have a common meaning but a different way to "deliver" it, I always find amusing how a differnt language/culture gets to the same point with completely different means.
• lhorie 6y ago
  I don't know about other languages, but when a friend asked me this question for portuguese a long time ago, I came up with "pet, "firetruck" and "sitcom" as examples. The first two translate to a noun plus an adjective ("animal de estimação" and "caminhão de bombeiro", respectively) and are not that interesting, but the last one has no translation whatsoever as far as I know, primarily because the very existence of sitcoms is sort of predicated on high variety of TV channels, whereas in smaller countries, there usually is only one or two very dominant ones.
  • sethammons 6y ago
    Sitcom is a conjoining of two word: situational comedy. I wonder if that makes it a great example or a poor one. Now I’m curious of other conjoined words... Edit: doh. I forgot there is a word for that: portmanteau.
    • lhorie 6y ago
      Yeah I was also a bit torn because of that. FWIW, "situational comedy" is not something that a english speaking person would normally say (or even necessarily understand without context), and likewise the literal Portuguese translation ("comédia situacional") is extremely unlikely to evoke a mental image of "Friends" the way that "sitcom" does in English. If I had to attempt to explain what "sitcom" means to a brazilian person, I might instead say something like "série de comédia americana", which translates literally to "american comedy series". In Japanese, there's the word "pasocon" (portmanteau of personal computer). Obviously here in the west, nobody would use that combination of words that way. So I think which portmanteaus exist in a language is a function of the originating culture, which is an interesting phenomenon on its own.
      • labster 6y ago
        Pasokon has been reborrowed by anime fans to refer to person-shaped personal computers, such as the androids seen in Chobits. Not a huge semantic drift, really. The more interesting part of Japanese portmanteaus is the use of the first two mora from each word, where English speakers would try to fit head to tail, like “persoputer” or something. But I guess in an agglutinative language, the end of a word is a much fuzzier concept.
• sethammons 6y ago
  “Fuck” in it’s multiple incarnations. Look up comedian Ismo on the meaning of “ass” on the Conan show.
  • esperent 6y ago
    Every language I've encountered has an equivalent word to "fuck" that basically takes the place of "most common swearword". In many languages, it's a literal translation - in other words, the equivalent of "fuck" is the most common swearword in many languages so translating it is probably not hard.
  • ajuc 6y ago
    English curse words are actually pretty restricted compared to some other languages. Example: https://img.joemonster.org/mg/albums/userpics/10001/prefix.jpg https://img.joemonster.org/mg/albums/userpics/10001/prefix.j... There's over 30 different pre- and post- fixes that can be added to any version of "fuck" (and Polish has several levels of vulgar verbs for "to fuck" coming from different roots: jebać, pierdolić, pieprzyć), and they each have slightly different primary and secondary meanings, for example: najebać/napierdolić (się) = to get completely drunk najebać/wjebać/wpieprzyć/wpierdolić (komuś) = to beat (someone) up jebnąć (w coś) = to hit (into something) podjebać/podpierdolić/podpieprzyć (coś) = to steal (something) podpierdolić/podjebać (kogoś) = to backstab (someone) spierdalać/spieprzać = to escape spierdolić/zjebać/spieprzyć = to fuck up something (you had a chance and wasted it in spectacular manner) wypierdolić/wyjebać/wypieprzyć (coś) = to throw (something) out wypierdolić/wyjebać/wypieprzyć (się) = to fall spectacularly wpierdolić (coś w/do czegoś) = to put (something in something) pierdolnąć (coś na coś) = to put (something on something) napierdolić/napieprzyć = to put too much of something nawpierdalać/nawpieprzać (się) = to eat too much wpierdolić (coś) = to eat a whole dish at once odjebało/odpierdoliło (mu) = (he) become insane wjebać/wpierdolić/wpieprzyć (się) = to get into inescapable situation because of your mistake odjebać/odpierdolić (coś) = to do (something) crazy/amazing/unbeliveable rozjebać/rozpierdolić/rozpieprzyć = to destroy something violently zapierdolić/zajebać (kogoś) = to kill (someone) the list goes on and on :) The root word determines the level of vulgarity and the pre/post fixes determine the meaning. These prefixes also work with nonvulgar words, but average word only supports several of them, not all at once. Most Slavic languages have similar constructions (but the exact meanings are often swapped).
• BerislavLopac 6y ago
  Not necessarily cultural significance, but my pet peeve about English are phrasal verbs, which are complex verbs constructed from a base verb and a preposition (most precisely, a postposition): get up, go on, take away etc. What makes them difficult is that the relation of the individual words in a phrase and its meaning is quite arbitrary -- it's interesting how you shut up a person but shut down a computer. :)
  • giantDinosaur 6y ago
    Phrasal verbs are indivisible in terms of their meaning, though, just like any other word. Aren't all verbs with no spaces also arbitrary? One must simply commit to memory. The hard part is avoiding the temptation of assuming constituent words determine the meaning precisely - a mistake you'd likely not make with an idiom or even an unassuming compound noun.
    • eythian 6y ago
      The harder thing with them is that the parts can be in different places in the sentence. "Clean up your room", "Clean your room up." Note: Dutch does it worse (IMbiasedO, as a native English speaker learning it), where they're actually one word (like it were "upclean"), but the front part can break off and float to the end of the sentence much of the time.
      • vinay427 6y ago
        Yep. German, which I'm learning, also unsurprisingly has this. I don't know that it's appreciably more difficult than the English two-word compounding given that the preposition can move around in all of these languages. I think it actually makes the conjugation of verbs, which have more endings at least in German, a bit more consistent.
      • BerislavLopac 6y ago
        > "Clean up your room", "Clean your room up." I've noticed (although can't remember an example right now) that sometimes the sentence can have a slightly different meaning if the preposition goes to the end. Another thing with English is that the word order is very important as it conveys a lot of meaning; in, for example, Slavic languages it is less critical as meaning relies heavily on various word forms.
• inopinatus 6y ago
  Slough.