When a word has no good equivalent
In my last post, I talked about words that were so closely tied to a certain country’s sporting event, they are inevitably used internationally in their original language. But how about words that don’t translate at all because the situation they grew out of just doesn’t exist elsewhere?
Many websites have compiled long lists of these, such as the Mirror.co.uk. Transubstantiation, a blog I follow, covers the topic here and here. Read more of his posts and you’ll see how deeply he gets into the notion of the impossibility of translation in general.
Some “untranslatable” words are less translatable than others. Take the Yamana word dona which means “to take lice from a person’s head and squash them between one’s teeth.” American English has no word for that, thank goodness. And there would be no way to translate “dona” (though I can’t imagine ever needing to professionally) without a translator’s note, which can make the translation either messy or unacceptable.
There are some cases, however, when a more practical “untranslatable” must be used. Keeping the word in the original language is prettier of course, but that’s not really translation. Preserving the original also falsely assumes the reader’s familiarity with that language and/or culture. Somewhere in between these two options, perhaps, creative use of periphrases and neologisms may help to bridge the two languages, even if some of the cultural flavor is lost.
One term that appears on many lists of untranslatables is the French esprit d’escalier, which means “to possess a mind that thinks of comebacks too late, as in when you’re descending the staircase (escalier) on your way out of a party.” The difficulty here is not that the idea does not exist in English (why not ?) but that the French coined a term based on a setting where this term frequently came into play. So we can translate the idea — “delayed wit,” pehaps — but the cultural flavor will be lost. How do you say, “Monday morning quarterbacking” in French?
8 responses so far ↓
1 Ryan Ginstrom // Jul 18, 2008 at 10:57 pm
In my experience, if you can get away from the actual words then you can translate it well. “He was the kind of guy who would always think of a come-back 10 seconds too late.” You could slip that into a translation without giving it a “translation smell.”
The big problem is when the text has a meta level hinging on its words or structure. A good example is poetry, which is notoriously hard to translate.
Word of advice to authors: if you know you’re going to be translated, avoid puns or clever wordplay!
2 Chris // Jul 24, 2008 at 9:21 pm
This past weekend I went for a bike ride with my dad and he took me out to brunch afterwards. It was really hot on Sunday so we were thirsty, so we drank a few glasses of water, got a complimentary mimosa, and then I ordered a cup of coffee. My stomach was filled with fluids to the point of it being uncomfortable. In German, there’s a word for that: “Wasserbauch” or ‘water stomach’. I wanted to say “uff, I have a Wasserbauch”. Instead I said something like ‘man, I drank too much’. It just doesn’t have that panache that the German does.
3 Ryan Ginstrom // Jul 26, 2008 at 11:12 pm
‘man, I drank too much’
How about, “Man, I’m sloshing.”
4 The GITS Blog » Is it really un-translatable? // Jul 27, 2008 at 12:53 pm
[...] yndigo blog has an interesting post about “untranslatables” — when a word in one language has no good equivalent translation into another. One of the [...]
5 MM // Jul 27, 2008 at 3:09 pm
There is an English word for Wasserbauch - dropsy - but we don’t use it much today and only ever in the medical sense.
6 Durf // Jul 28, 2008 at 3:14 am
Take the Yamana word dona which means “to take lice from a person’s head and squash them between one’s teeth.”
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No thanks . . . But really, though, what is there about your phrase in quotes there that makes it not a translation of the term? “No one-to-one vocabulary equivalence” isn’t the same as “not translatable.”
I stuck your feed in my list of daily reads. Hello from Tokyo!
7 Glenn // Jul 28, 2008 at 11:00 am
Thanks all for the comments!
Durf, thanks a lot for your question. correct me if I’m wrong but in translation, the term “untranslatable” refers — perhaps by convention — to words lacking a one-to-one correspondence in another language.
One might argue that thoughts exist that have occurred to speakers of one language that have not or could not occur to speakers of another (and would thus be untranslatable no matter how many words you use) but that is not what I’m talking about here. Each “untranslatable” term can be explained or translated.
Glenn
8 Ryan Ginstrom // Jul 29, 2008 at 9:23 pm
“”"
the term “untranslatable” refers — perhaps by convention — to words lacking a one-to-one correspondence in another language.
“”"
I have to admit that I’ve never heard of the term being used in this way. Forgive my ignorance, but can this information be of any use to translators apart from trivia?
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