Appendix talk:Terms considered difficult or impossible to translate into English/Archive

Loanwords

Any thoughts on how semi-obscure loanwords that have recently been assimilated into English (e.g., schadenfreude) should be handled?   — C M B J   10:05, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

If they have been assimilated into English, they have an English translation. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 11:40, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

That's more or less what I was thinking, but how do we make that determination and where do we draw the line? Schadenfreude was not something that ever really entered the English lexicon, it was just a foreign curiosity enjoyed by a small subset of English speakers that then gained popularity with the advent of the Internet. This is something of a meta-consideration because our appendix may eventually lead to similar exposure of some terms.   — C M B J   11:59, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

This doesn't really speak to your basic discussion, but fwiw Schadenfreude is neither obscure in educated English, nor was it unknown prior to the internet. It has a listing in my 1951 Webster's, and I certainly knew its meaning in high school in the 1960s from reading the newspaper. I haven't seen any great change in the extent of its usage since the Internet became popular. Mathglot (talk) 05:35, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Editnotice

An editnotice needs to be drafted and created as per previous discussion.   — C M B J   10:32, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Ungoliant's draft

"Do not add words that don’t have entries, or whose definitions do not match the definitions listed by the entry. Create the entry first."

Resources (old list section)

(List merged with new section)

List copied from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others#Category:Terms without an English counterpart.   — C M B J   10:39, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

I have found an excellent book, The Meaning of Tingo, which is full of terms falling within this category. bd2412 T 22:13, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

That book is not a good resource. It’s full of made-up, incorrect and exaggerated meanings. See Talk:tingo#An analysis of Portuguese terms in The Meaning of Tingo for examples of how seriously the author misinterprets words. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 22:32, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

I must admit, I was a bit taken by the breadth of the thing. Thanks for the tip! Of course, we can still check out and vet some of the words that he claims have no English analog. bd2412 T 23:23, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Actually, I would encourage you (or anyone) to use popular literature like this as a place for finding acceptable terms, because, even if 80% of the entire book is flawed, that still means we'll get some really good ones out of it. If there is any question about a term (i.e., one we don't have an entry about) then it should be carefully researched before its addition, but any term that even could potentially be a candidate should be brought to this talk page for discussion, both because it may in fact be acceptable and because if it isn't then we need to have it archived to that effect.   — C M B J   00:37, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Silly

Since the "meaning" column of the table is precisely showing translations of the terms in question, how are they "difficult or impossible to translate"? Translation is not, and never has been, about turning one word in the source language into one other word in the target language. Ƿidsiþ 13:13, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

It's a matter of opinion, I suppose, but personally I'm laying in bed and can't put my phone down and go to sleep because everyone else's contributions have been so interesting.   — C M B J   13:21, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Yes they are very interesting, but you seem to be confusing "untranslatability" with "lack of a single one-word equivalent". French regarder requires two words to be translated into English, but it's not untranslatable, so what are the criteria here? Ƿidsiþ 13:23, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Lack of a single equivalent term is the idea, i.e. that which cannot be translated without going into literal description.   — C M B J   13:34, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what translation is; it's not about transcoding one word into another word. This is one reason why linguists are very skeptical about claims of amazing untranslatable words...see e.g. this discussion, which refers to several of the words on this list. Ƿidsiþ 13:40, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

I'm no stranger to tingo after getting caught up in that word's discussion and I'm pretty sure I bumped into this article in the course of that, but the core issue of concern in this area seems to be quality. We actually have people from all around the world who have a pretty good command of just about every language, so we can make consensus-driven revisions that correct these shortcomings.   — C M B J   13:56, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

• I do like the idea of countering the pop-linguistic trend described in the Language Log post linked to above by providing a list of terms whose actual meanings and spellings have been verified. —Angr 14:07, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough, and I find a lot of these words interesting too. But they are not difficult or impossible to translate – they just don't all have convenient single-word equivalents. Which is not the same thing. Ƿidsiþ 14:27, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

It's important to distinguish between single-term and single-word equivalents, because terms and words are objects but multiple word translations convey meaning by description.   — C M B J   14:35, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Technically I agree with Widsith here; if you can translate a term using a sentence, you are translating it nonetheless. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:52, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Sure, you're still making that term's meaning understandable in another language, but it's only through the power of human description and understanding. In contrast, think of how systems view translation. They identify objects, find equivalents, and process them according to a target language-specific semantic algorithm.   — C M B J   00:02, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

"Sure, you're still making that term's meaning understandable in another language, but it's only through the power of human description and understanding." Yes, that is what translation is. Never mind how ‘systems’ view it, whatever that means, why not listen to how translators view it. Ƿidsiþ 07:21, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

As a casual reader looking for interesting titbits, I love stuff like this, but as a linguist, I have to say that I agree with Ƿidsiþ. As interesting as this list might be, "untranslatable words" are well and truly in the realm of pop linguistics. It really goes without saying there are going to be plenty of times when some language expresses some meaning more efficiently than English does, or has a word for which there is no exact English word-to-word equivalent, but that's not at all what translation is about. More analytic languages (like English) prefer to use a series of words to denote something which a more synthetic language (like, say, Finnish) would denote with a single word; taking that typological difference between languages as evidence for a word's being untranslatable doesn't really make a lot of sense when you look past the appeal of having a fun factoid.
To give a concrete example, the Japanese word damasareyasui means "easy to be deceived". Wow! One word that needs four English words to translate it? Sure, but it's not some special word – there are thousands like it. It's just made up of damasa (imperfective stem of "to deceive") + -reru (passive suffix) + -yasui (easy to verb).
This might seem all a bit off-topic, but what I'm trying to demonstrate is that the amount of words it takes to translate something into English doesn't really say that much about how easy or difficult it is to translate that word into English. Most of the time, it doesn't say anything really interesting about the word at all. It says much more about the differences between the grammars of the languages than anything else. D4g0thur (talk) 16:12, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

That example is correct. The proposals so far have been interesting in the spirit of "editors' picks"--I've even added a few myself--but I agree that they're no more than pop linguistics. None of the Japanese terms added so far are untranslatable. In eight years I've never encountered one. I'd like to find a system that can view translation, identify objects, find equivalents, and process them according to a target language-specific semantic algorithm because it would help me when I translate Japanese and I could make a lot of money. So far the only method I have is to use my brain, and every word is difficult to translate, which makes translation a bit slow and limits how much I can earn. --Haplology (talk) 17:06, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

What does "untranslatable" mean?

I have to agree with Ƿidsiþ and D4g0thur here. I think the essential problem with this topic is that it doesn't have a well-defined description; putting it another way--like a poorly written law where you cannot be sure whether you're breaking the law or obeying it, there doesn't seem to be any surefire way here of determining whether some candidate term is, or isn't a proper entry for this article.

An article about translation difficulties would be a different thing, and likely quite interesting, and plenty of terms could be listed in a table there along with explanations of what's difficult about them on a case-by-case basis. (Whether it would rate an article in an encylopedia is a separate question.) Translators from the Hungarian for example, have to deal with texts containing the pronoun "ő" which means either "he" or "she"--one cannot tell which. Does this belong on the list here? I'd say no, because normally context makes this clear, but not always. There are zillions of examples like this.

Verb conjugations are a thicket of complications: how do you deal with Finnish verbs, each of which, if conjugated fully can have over 20,000 inflected forms, each with its (slightly) different translation? Are these untranslatable? Or do they each just need several words to translate them? What is the difference?

In ASL, the use of classifiers is a core language element, and can be used to indicate huge herd of cattle moving outward. Is this an untranslatable ASL sign? Or is that concise six-word fragment the very simple translation of it?

In a true table of untranslatable terms, the second column would be blank, or at best, a vague paraphrase: "It's something nice having to do with hair, but unfortunately English doesn't have the words for me to explain it to you exactly. Sorry." But that's not the case. Given sufficient words, any term can be translated. After all, we have a translation for grok, and that comes from Martian. ☺ Mathglot (talk) 06:25, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Given sufficient words, any term can be explained, but not necessarily translated. --WikiTiki89 16:59, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps not every term can be translated, but certainly every term in this table has been translated. D4g0thur (talk) 11:07, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Red links

I'm a little baffled why the request not to add red links to the main page was removed. I think it's a good idea to store red links here on the talk page until their entries are created and verified. —Angr 14:25, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

See User talk:Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV#New appendix. I agree with putting it back though. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 14:28, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

It was removed at my suggestion because there were a lot of great red links pouring in. I think that everyone who has this appendix on their radar right now knows what should and shouldn't be considered appropriate. If they don't, we'll move problematic terms back to the talk page after a reasonable grace period.   — C M B J   14:33, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Let’s add it back now? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 12:02, 8 June 2013 (UTC)