Untranslatable Words | Can a Word Be ‘Untranslatable’?
A new word is created approximately every 100 minutes, and languages are constantly changing – adopting new phrases, borrowing words and terminology from other languages, and modernizing to keep up with trends. Moreover culture plays a major role in how language is used, making some words very difficult to translate. For those words that do not have an exact translation, there is at least a close equivalent in another language. But in some cases, it is possible to only approximate or explain the meaning of a word in its translation. Let’s take the following ten untranslatable words for example:
10 Untranslatable Words
1) Komorebi 木漏れ日 (Japanese) | Untranslatable Words
The interplay between the light and the leaves as sunlight filters through the trees.
2) Cualacino (Italian) | Untranslatable Words
The mark left on a table by a cold glass.
3) Pochemuchka (Russian) | Untranslatable Words
A person who asks too many questions,
“Why?, why? why?”
4) Kefi (Greek) | Untranslatable Words
Joy, spirit, passion, happiness, triumph, mojo, excitement, feeling good, having fun, or loving life.
5) Ktsuarpok (Inuit) | Untranslatable Words
The anticipation of waiting for someone to come to your house, causing you to keep going outside to check if they’ve arrived yet.
6) Sobremesa (Spanish) | Untranslatable Words
The situation where you keep talking after the meal has ended with the people you shared your lunch or dinner.
7) Jayus (Indonesian)
A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh.
8) Pana Po’o (Hawaiian) | Untranslatable Words
The act of scratching your head in order to remember something.
9) Kummerspeck (German)
Excess weight gained from emotional overeating.
10) Vybafnout (Czech)
A word tailor-made for annoying older brothers—it means to jump out and say “boo”.
Translation of Untranslatable Words
Many translation services experts are of the school of thought that nothing is completely translatable or untranslatable, but rather that translation can be defined by the degree of difficulty of identifying the equivalent word or phrase in another language. Thus a word that is “untranslatable” means simply that it has no direct equivalent in another language. So despite the fact that a word-for-word translation is not always possible, this does not mean that there is no adequate equivalent.
Experienced translators use different strategies to overcome this issue including:
1) Adaptation (free translation) – the translator replaces a term or phrase that has cultural connotations in the original language with a term that carries a similar connotation in the translated language;
2) Paraphrasing – a group of words used to explain a single word that has no direct equivalent;
3) Calque – the translator breaks down a word and provides a direct translation of its parts.
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