The Japanese have a word to describe the pile of books gathering dust on her bedside table: tsundoku.
The feeling of making a situation worse by trying to improve it? The Germans call it verschlimmbessern.
All languages have their untranslatable treasures. Words that evoke a complex emotion or that testify to a way of life, without equivalent in French.
Recently, the popular American dictionary Merriam-Webster surveyed its Twitter followers. “What perfect word can’t be translated into English?” he asked.
And the answers – which amount to more than 3000 – are tasty.
” Apapachar is a Spanish word of Mexican origin which comes from the Nahuatl language and which literally means ‘to embrace with the soul’”, says one of them.
“My grandfather used the Finnish word sisu “, shares another Internet user. “You hate doing something, but it has to be done, so you do it anyway,” he explains.
Our favorite answer: cabelsalat – or literally “cable salad” in German – when cables from the TV or WiFi router become tangled in a knot.
All languages are full of these little gems, a priori impossible to translate.
French philosopher Barbara Cassin, who led the essay Dictionary of untranslatablespoke of words “that we never stop translating”.
“These are words so rich that we never finished translating them. There is not one possible translation, but several,” explains Hélène Buzelin, professor in the department of linguistics and translation at the Université de Montréal.
The usefulness of words
These wacky expressions can make you smile or charm, but they have a real function for their speakers.
Words respond to “communicative needs,” recalls professor in the linguistics department at the University of Quebec in Montreal Elizabeth Allyn Smith. “We will develop specific words for concepts that are useful to us,” she explains.
As a result, untranslatable words often reflect “the values and concerns” of their society of origin.
The Portuguese expression saudade is a famous example. Deeply rooted in the country’s history and culture, it expresses a complex feeling, between melancholy, nostalgia and hope.
The French language also has words specific to its cultural context, note Mme Smith. In Quebec, a person sensitive to the cold is chilly, she gives as an example. In France, to stroll is a way of life.
Sometimes words are also difficult to translate simply because they are polysemic, that is to say they have several meanings.
For example, the term care in English can mean to care, to be interested or to feel affection for someone or something, depending on the context. ” The concept of caring doesn’t really have an equivalent in French if we had to translate all the senses in which we can use it,” observes Hélène Buzelin.
Besides, it’s not for nothing that we often have the impression that English has a word for everything.
English is one of the languages with the most entries in the dictionary. And the reason is historic, says Professor Elizabeth Allyn Smith. Originally a Germanic language, English interacted strongly with French, a language derived from Latin, after the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
“It’s a kleptomaniac language that steals a lot of words and interacts with a lot of languages,” adds M.me Smith.
German is also a language conducive to untranslatable words, but for a purely syntactic reason. “It’s a language that has a lot of portmanteau words in which they can put lots of concepts together,” she explains.
Equivalent hard to find
“Languages are not symmetrical. There is almost never a perfect equivalent between two words”, summarizes Hélène Buzelin.
The Italian writer Umberto Eco said that translating is never more than “saying almost the same thing”. Even though translation is often considered a “test”, adds Mme Buzelin.
“It consists of transplanting a text that was born in a cultural, historical and linguistic context to make it accessible to another readership,” she explains.
However, some words “resist translation,” she notes. And cause headaches for translators… who have no choice but to find a solution.
“As a literary translator, you cannot refuse to translate the slightest sentence of a text. We have to respect the full text”, underlines Eric Reyes Roher, Franco-Mexican translator who signed the translation from Spanish to French of the novel. To fall, published by Mémoire d’encrier.
Fortunately, there are strategies when a translator comes up against a term with no apparent equivalent. When the word refers to a cultural reality, for example cegephe can simply leave the word as it is or translate it literally.
“The problem is that it may not be understood by the readership. Often, what we will do is put an explanation, often in the body of the text, ”says Hélène Buzelin. It is also possible to replace the word with a more generic expression, agreeing to lose certain subtleties during the transfer to the other language.
Language evolution
What is not a word in French today may become one one day.
The owners of a language are its speakers, not its institutions like the French Academy or the Quebec Office of the French language, underlines Elizabeth Allyn Smith.
Modeled on the English name serendipity, word serendipity is now accepted in French. It designates, in a pretty sounding, the fact of making a discovery, scientific in particular, by chance.
“Our communication needs change and it is we who decide what we are going to borrow or not,” concludes Ms.me Smith.
A few untranslatable words
- Sohwakhaeng (Korean): the joy of small daily pleasures
- Change of scenery (French): feeling far from home, uncomfortable in a foreign environment
- Abbiocco (Italian): commonly used to describe the feeling of fatigue after a heavy meal
- Tartle (Scottish English): hesitating when introducing someone because you forgot their name