#untranslatable

[unhonestlymirror]

[thatswhywelovegermany]

[asta-daily]

Mouseys - En Garde-Manger

- Bread yourself!, en garde! - Step aside, rice-call! - You'll never pasta me, I'll box you right there! - Can you do it? Halva you!

/* Pencil doodle on A6 sketchbook - Porte-mine sur carnet A6 */ /* Part of the Mouseys Adventures series */ - En garde-manger ! - Sel et Rat, hors de mon chemin ! - Sur mon eau de vie, tu ne passeras pas ! - C'est ce qu'on va voir, gare à tes pâtes !

[davidlavieri]

To be stared at, all the time, everywhere. Except to describe it as staring is already to misrepresent it, to conjure up an image of a long, fixed, open-eyed sort of look with a discernible owner, and while there are some of those, like the man who waits in the road outside your flat and stands still and solid as a rock as you pass, glaring at you with hatred in his eyes, it mostly does not feel that way. Rather, it is the glance thrown furtively, a move performed less with the whites of the eyes and more the dark of the eyelashes, so that en masse, the sensation is that of being caressed by a hundred feathered wings, or cut by a hundred tiny blades. Chira-chira is the word for it, this scattered, stolen look, the same word used for the soft twinkling of the stars, a light fall of snow, the fluttering of candlelight.

Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds

[thief-of-roses]

Yuugen (giapponese):

Consapevolezza dell'universo che risveglia un sentimento troppo vasto per le parole, indica una indecifrabile profondità e la bellezza nascosta, il fascino delle cose in penombra che non si riescono a comprendere perfettamente.

[witchof-hearts]

lol

[onryou-onryou]

Fugazi - "Margin Walker"

[unhonestlymirror]

[thatswhywelovegermany]

[mijnmobielemoleskine]

I too, am untranslatable.

Walt Whitman

[gramrgednangel]

"Untranslatable" is Anglo-centric

Have you noticed that every writeup about “untranslatable words” includes translations of them? That has annoyed me for years now. It’s othering to the languages of those words. There’s nothing worse or better about words that have no one-to-one translation from their home languages into English. English winds up borrowing them most of the time as loanwords, anyway, because they’re so darn…

[abed-with-a-knife]

cat burglar you don’t know just what you want….

[pvtchurch]

russian twins headcanon my beloved

[spanishskulduggery]

What word or words do you wish we had in English? For example, I love estadounidense. It’s so much easier than saying “person from the United States”.

estadounidense is such a good example lol - the closest thing we have in English, that is totally informal, is calling it "USian"

I think there are a handful of words that I've come across where you can't totally translate because it's like... a visceral feeling you only understand if you know the culture?

mala leche is a big one; I can never quite describe it to people, but when you get more used to the culture you see mala leche and part of you makes that noise like you just touched something really hot and immediately withdraw, that's the gut reaction to how bad the vibe is haha

Also the verb madrugar is hard to get quite right; because it means "to get up early", but this can also be something more like "to get up so early the sun hasn't come out yet"

I think estrenar is another one that's a little more difficult to translate or I wish there were a better way to explain it; the closest you can get is "to debut" (and same idea for acting, "to debut" or "to star"), or "to show off (for the first time)" like with clothes

...And this one is probably more relevant for Spanish-speaking countries or countries with stricter naming policies, but tocayo/a I wish had a better translation in English

The equivalent is "namesake", but tocayo/a can mean "someone with the same name as you" - so it could be "someone you were named after" like a relative or a saint, like you had a grandparent named Robert and now you're Robbie or Roberta, that's a tocayo/a even if it's a genderswapped version (which they also did for saints like John turns to Juan or Juana) - but it could also just be like "yeah there are three girls named Ashley in my class" or "my name is Maria and so is hers" etc. and that's also tocayo/a

-

There are also some words that just don't have the same meaning anymore, ones that make sense in some languages but not English

The idea of tutear "to speak informally with someone" literally "to tú someone" is hard to express in English where in general we address everyone the same, but in older English it was "to thou" someone because we used to have more emphasis on classes and social standing - something that makes total sense in many Asian countries, or countries that use a more formal or informal register, but something very much lost in some English-speaking countries

[valtsv]

i know that this is a monkey's paw kind of statement but out of all the podcasts i've listened to the silt verses is the one that i think would actually make a really good tv show