Appendix:Terms considered difficult or impossible to translate into English
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
This index contains terms that are considered “untranslatable”, meaning difficult or impossible to translate directly into an English equivalent.
Terms without an English equivalent[edit]
| Term | Meaning | Language | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| afturbatapíka | An unmarried woman or girl who has had a child, which has however since been forgotten, resulting in her being considered a virgin again. | Icelandic | Literally "convalescent virgin". |
| alpeggiare | To pasture or stay in Alpine meadows in the summer. | Italian | |
| cafuné | The act of fondling someone's hair or scalp. | Portuguese (in Brazil) | |
| coisar | To do anything (placeholder for any unrecalled verb). | Portuguese | |
| онади (onadi), онакви (onakvi) | Macedonian | Verb from она (ona, “it”) | |
| color cane che fugge | A nonspecific or nameless color. (English does not have a clear equivalent; sometimes sky-blue pink is used without particular meaning, but it also specifies a real (spectrum of) color the sky sometimes turns; similarly, reddish-green is sometimes used in philosophy as a nonsensical or impossible color, but it also specifies a real color some plants have.) | Italian | Literally “color of a dog that flees”. |
| color de gos com fuig | Catalan | ||
| color de perro que huye | Spanish | ||
| cor de burro quando foge | Portuguese | Literally “color of a donkey when it flees”. | |
| chuva de molhar bobo | A rain that seems light enough for people to walk around in without getting wet, fooling those who do into getting soaked; alternatively, a rain that falls before those walking around expected it to come, soaking those who foolishly went out without an umbrella. | Portuguese (in Brazil) | Literally “fool-wetting rain”. |
| chuva molha-tolos | Portuguese (in Portugal) | ||
| fensterln | To visit a girl who is the object of one's affections at night, either by coming to her window or by climbing through it into her room. | Bavarian, German | |
| hantâ | A verb used in the imperative to announce a dead zebra, whether killed or found. | Hadza | As the verb is imperative, its form changes depending on the number and sex of the people being addressed. There are a number of such words for different kinds of animal. |
| Kummerspeck | Excess weight gained as a result of stress-related eating. | German | Literally “grief-fat”. |
| plʔɛŋ | To have a blood-like smell that attracts tigers and leopards. | Jehai | Used to describe crushed head lice; the blood of most rodents (including squirrels) and civets, gibbons, and some other animals; cooked wild lemongrass; and stagnant water (e.g. in bamboo stems). Contrasted with e.g. pʔih, which is to have a blood-like smell like raw meat or fish. |
| saudade, soidade | The feeling of missing something or someone. Approximate to longing. | Galician | |
| saudade | Portuguese | ||
| saudade | Spanish | ||
| دلتنگی (deltangi) | Persian | ||
| شَوْق (šawq) / اِشْتِيَاق (ištiyāq) | Arabic | ||
| Sitzriese | A person who appears tall when seated but short when standing. | German | Literally “sit-giant”. |
| Sitzzwerg | A person who appears short when seated but tall when standing. | German | Literally “sit-dwarf”. |
| skämskudde | A real or imagined pillow one hides behind when experiencing vicarious embarrassment due to watching something embarrassing. | Swedish | |
| vetja | Used as a filler after bringing forth an idea or suggestion. | Swedish | Literally "I know". |
| vitja nafns | To appear in the dream of a pregnant woman and suggest a name for her child. | Icelandic | Literally "to visit a name" or "to visit for a name". This action is usually done by dead relatives. It is sometimes considered bad luck for the parents to not honor this request. |
| почему́чка (počemúčka) | A person, often a child, who asks a lot of questions, especially “why” questions. | Russian | From почему́ (počemú, “why”). The term gained currency in English after it was named #9 in a BBC list of the top 10 most difficult words (in any language) to translate.[1] |
| غیرت (ğeyrat) | The desire to control female members of the family and protect them from unwanted sexual attention. | Persian, etc. | Also borrowed into other languages. |
| 猫舌 (nekojita) | A person who can't eat or drink anything hot (at a high temperature) until it cools, due to having an overly sensitive tongue. | Japanese | Literally “cat-tongue”. |
| 渋い (shibui) | Having a simple, subtle, and unobtrusive beauty (see also Shibui at Wikipedia). | Japanese | |
| 積ん読 (tsundoku) | The act of buying a book and leaving it, unread, piled up with other unread books. | Japanese | A kind of visual pun on the verb phrase 積んで置く (tsunde oku, literally “to pile up and leave something”). This use of oku is quite common, and the -e oku verb combination commonly contracts in fast or informal speech into just -oku: tsunde oku → tsundoku. The doku portion was then spelled with 読 (“to read, reading”), which is read as doku in Sinoxenic compounds, to allude to books as the object of the action. |
| 失獨／失独 (shīdú) | (Of parents) to lose their only child, but being unable to have another due to old age or government policy. | Chinese | Literally “lose only”. |
| حُلِیَہ (huliya) | A person's style or characteristics, or more strictly their countenance | Urdu | |
| نِعْمُ البَدَل (ni’mu lbadal) | A better substitute following the loss of something – including lives and possessions. | Urdu | Literally "the exchange of blessings". |
| عِیادَت ('iyādat) | Enquiring or visiting of a friend or a family member who is either ill or admitted to hospital as a patient. | Urdu |