You all know how we feel around here about those lists of so-called untranslatable words but one that popped up on an education forum I belong to had me scratching my head more than usual.
As well as the usual suspects (Gemütlichkeit, L'esprit de l'escalier) which we see and debunk so often there were a couple that drew my attention.

One begins

Fisk: Swedish for coffee break

Another says

Luftmensch: Yiddish for dreamer

And another says

Duende: Spanish for soul-searching

Am I missing something important or did they just actually translate those "untranslatable words" right there in the article? And into pretty simple equivalent English terms at that.

Well, let's take luftmensch as an example. It's fine translated the way it is, but it means so much more. Read this from AWAD. The definition is not completely represented by "dreamer." I think that is what is mean by "untranslatable." "Dreamer" doesn't nail it, so to speak.

The OED say "impractical visionary". I think "dreamer" is a fine one-word translation.

Well I've never seen 'duende' as soul-searching. It can mean 'enchantment' or charisma', but those are pretty far down on the list. Typically you see it as a dwarf, elf, goblin, et al mythical creature. Hardly untranslatable.

Yes, goofy, as I said above, it's a "fine" definition. But it isn't perfect, particularly to native speakers. There is a whole other thread of meaning about not being practical.

But Kalleh, what you are saying is EXACTLY the meaning that I use "dreamer" for. To me calling someone a "dreamer" has precisely the meaning of someone who has impractical ideas. Maybe English can't be translated into English.

Bob, I was thinking of this issue recently in the course of tutoring Spanish. "Ponerse ____ [emotion]" is confusing at first to beginners. For example, "se puse enojado" translates as "he became (or got) angry." "Poner" means "to put" and "ponerse" is the reflexive. It means many things in various contexts, but is the uniform choice for "to become [angry]" or "to make" [angry].

English speakers resist & question the reflexive nature of the expression- no, I did not make myself angry, he made me angry. But there is no comfy equivalent in Spanish; you can horse around with tangled apparent equivalents, but there is no "hacer sentir" [literally, to make to feel] in Spanish.

One inevitably arrives at a Spanish construction we Eng native speakers sense 'really' means "what he did" or "what happened" makes me angry. Which can sound PC to our ears, like the common parenting advice to favor "it makes me angry when you..." Over "you make me angry."

This was the sort of cultural difference I heard when first learning other languages that made me feel (!) I was stepping into a slightly different world-- that there were 'untranslatable' expressions. This example can easily be translated, but it conveys something extra: the Spanish sense that one is responsible for one's emotions, they are not visited on one by someone or something outside the self.

I don't buy it. Just because they use a reflexive verb doesn't mean they believe that one is responsible for one's emotions! I don't think thought and grammar are linked that closely.

I am reminded of this, or the discussion I had with a friend about French "avoir raison". He thought this phrase meant that French speakers had some fundamentally different way of thinking than English speakers - because in French you say literally "you have reason" for "you are right".

It seems that he was saying French speakers think in English, and translate their thoughts word-for-word into French. "Vous avez raison" translates word-for-word as "you have reason" but it means "you are right". Think of it as an idiom. Idioms translate word-for-word as all sorts of crazy things. Translating word-for-word leads to madness.

And there's really no way to say "he made me angry" in Spanish? Me hizo enojar?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: goofy,

Exactly so, goofy. If a Chinese person wishes to answer the question "Ni hao ma?" (How are you?) with the equivalent of "so-so" he is likely to say "ma ma hu hu" which is an idiom that literally translated means "horse horse tiger tiger". Are we to take this as a sign that Chinese people identify more with their animal natures than Europeans or Americans? Of course not. It's just an idiom.

Fisk: Swedish for coffee break

It's actually "fika", both a noun and verb meaning "coffee, to drink coffee".

This conversation seems to pop up from time to time, and I am on the fence. I understand what you are saying, Bob and goofy, but I still remember my friend who moved to the U.S. from China when she was 20. She felt, and still does, that many words from Chinese couldn't be accurately translated in English. Yes, she certainly more than gets by here (she's a professor), but that feeling about untranslatable words will never escape her.

Having said that, I probably don't have enough knowledge myself to conclude either way because I have never lived in another country where I had to communicate in another language. I wish I had.

bethree5 might be interested in this study that is reported "Spanish speakers have a different sense of blame than English speakers."

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592

Liberman notes that there is a measurably small difference but that the difference can be easily erased by exposing the subjects to 20 sentences:

quote:

Certainly we should reinforce our prior belief that a small amount of short-term priming creates powerful (if presumably temporary) effects — exposure to 24 sentences, in this case, was enough to generate an effect roughly twice as large as the difference between being a monolingual English-speaking undergraduate at Stanford and being a monolingual Spanish-speaking undergraduate at the Universidad de Chile.

We also should certainly reinforce our prior belief that, as Lane Greene aptly put it, "language nudges thought (in certain circumstances)". Even modest statistical differences in the way that different language communities tend to express things may correlate with modest differences in the way that their members remember things, if the experimental circumstances are carefully calibrated to produce memory performance in a range that allows these effects to be measured.
But we should certainly not, in my opinion, conclude that there is "a different sense of blame in … Spanish".

I'm monolingual so what I know is informed by studies like this. If our language exerts a fundamental influence on our thought, we haven't found it yet.

Goofy, I thought French was a language that Canadians were expected to know, too. Is it?

From time to time, because this has come up a number of times, I've agreed that supposed "untranslatable" words can be adequately translated by using a number of sentences (in some cases). I don't think my Chinese colleague would agree, but the evidence is pretty convincing.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
Goofy, I thought French was a language that Canadians were expected to know, too. Is it?

We have to study French in public school, but nothing more.

Goofy thanks for the link and your thoughtful reply.

The study in itself doesn't seem to prove anything of great significance, but the discussion by Liberman & his commenters is informative & thought-provoking with all its examples of other factors not considered. I particularly liked Lane Greene's version of what Boroditsky's study shows: "...my conclusion would be not "language shapes thought" (much less "language restricts thought"), but probably "language nudges thought" (in certain circumstances)."

Greene's conclusion is a better statement of how I view the very common Spanish phrase 'ponerse' + emotion (say, 'enojado'), where the agent of the emotion is expressed indirectly. The very typical Sp statement is something like 'due to such-&-such I made myself angry.' (There is no direct translation of 'become'). Whereas, if one wishes to emphasize the agency in Sp, one has to reach for a less-common phrase like your 'me hizo enojado.' I like the discussions of usage on wordreference.com, where folks from various countries chime in. That phrasing, while commonplace in a direct English translation, is viewed by Spanish-speaking commenters there as unusually direct & even rude. And that is no doubt a product of its grammatical structure being less 'agent-driven' than English (& Japanese, apparently even less so).

But an even better test is suggested by your comment, where you disagree with a friend that a literal translation of 'vous avez raison' (you have reason, or rationality)-- as opposed to the normal translation 'you're right', is significant. As you imply, your friend's argument is essentially English-based. It's only basis is how English speakers would interpret a literal translation, & there's no reason not to treat it as an equivalent idiom.

However. There is an impact when communicating in normal, agent-strong English which must be considered. As Liberman notes, it is absolutely normal in English to assign blame, purely as a grammatical issue, in an accident. For example, 'John broke the vase'-- which would be expressed in a less 'agentive' language like Span or Jap as 'The vase got broken (John was involved).'

It would be tempting to conclude that our 'agentive' language causes us to be an overly litigious society, but we'd probably find that other Eng-speaking nations are less so; that this is a function of our economic system. But when speaking to a child, or when negotiating, our language "nudges us" toward blame, & it behoves us to stretch a little, and select more impersonal constructions which are also available in English.

Your discussion of blame in the English language, as compared to other languages, Bethree, is interesting. I wonder if it affects safety in health care in the U.S. Safety science has found that when blame is assigned to medical errors, the health care workers try to hide them and we don't identify the errors or study the root cause of them. However, when we move to a more "just culture" (that is, not always blaming people, but instead identifying the system errors, which many times are the cause of errors), errors are much decreased. So - is our language maybe one of the reasons for our huge number of medical errors? It's an interesting thought.