Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

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Nothing was "demolished", nothing can be "demolished" in this regard, as many of the people who speak and read two or more languages fluently will attest.

For one thing, many of the swear words/expressions cannot be translated, not even by using more than one word/a few words, there are languages where one can fill entire books with swear-words/expressions (one of them is Romanian, which I speak natively, I've heard the same thing about Russian or Hungarian) and there are languages where swear words/expressions are a lot less diverse (English is the example I know best).

Of course, one can try to naively translate the "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mamii tale!" into the English "I will insert my dick into your mother's dead people", but this naive translation doesn't (can't) catch the word inversion "băga-mi-aș" (from "mi-aș băga") which makes the whole action sound a lot more dynamic and direct in Romanian, plus the word "pula" has a lot more meanings and context in Romanian compared to the simpler uses of "dick" in English, and last but not least the Anglo world seems not to care about one's dead people as much as we Romanians do (and I think we're not the only ones), and as such mentioning some other person's dead close relatives in a derogatory way is seen at most as quaint (while "morții tăi!"/"your dead people!" in Romanian is oftentimes used as a swear expression all by itself, I know I use it frequently).

And this before we get to all the diminutives/suffixes that can be added to any word that is part of a swear expression (and not only) in a language like Romanian, a feature that is absent from most of the English language. For example the mentioned above example can very be easily changed into:

> "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mămițicii tale!"

with the "mamii" to "mămățicii" change (basically from "your mother" to "your little mother", where "little" actually means "more loved"/closer to the person being addressed) giving the whole swear expression a new other, even more personal feeling.

Maybe it would be easier to see how pedantic this discussion is if the title were just "Words that don't easily translate". By my reading, you just did a pretty good job of translating that epithet, though it took you many words. I suspect you could do an even more precise job with even more words.

> many of the swear words/expressions cannot be translated

"...with the same cultural meaning into a different culture."

But that's a truism, surely. The words and expressions themselves can be translated as you demonstrated.

If you can't translate the meaning you haven't translated the phrase.

It’s an absurd argument. Either everything is translatable because language allows for any arbitrarily complex construct that lets you circumlocute your way around, or nothing is translatable because everything is steeped in a unique cultural context which you either are a part of or aren’t.

What OP is ranting about is websites glorifying certain words as “untranslatable”, imbuing them with esoteric cultural meaning. As a polyglot and linguistics enthusiast it frustrates me too but we all have to come to terms with people being wrong on the internet some day.

Nothing absurd about it, because nobody said translation is easy (apart from some tech people who have been put in front of the problem for the first time). And yes, many of the good literary translations that I’ve read do provide part of the cultural context in the footnotes.

From an epistemological point of view, the word "cat" is as untranslatable as the word "sobremesa". That's the absurd part that gets people in arguments on the internet.

In practice, we get by mostly fine (partly because, as you point out, we have footnotes).

> And this before we get to all the diminutives/suffixes that can be added to any word that is part of a swear expression (and not only) in a language like Romanian, a feature that is absent from most of the English language

English has many diminutives as well, mother is considered rather formal. Mum, mummy, mumsie, mam, all convey different semantic levels of closeness.

The point linguists try to make is that 'untranslatable' doesn't exist, based on what they've seen thus far. To use a JS metaphor, some language features may require a semantic polyfill to translate a particular word (and some of these "polyfills" will be larger than others). But literally nothing in any human language is untranslatable, and this has to do with fairly fundamental issues of neuroscience and biology.

If we did find untranslatable concepts in Earth-based human languages, it'd have very interesting implications about the nature of human brains.

But those are ordinary problems of any sort of translation.

My Hungarian friend has often complained about how poor English is in comparison to his native Hungarian as a language for swearing. From your example, I'd say Hungarian swearing is stylistically similar to Romanian.

He also told me about his favorite untranslatable Hungarian word, "bezzeg", which has to be handled on a case-by-case basis when translating into English.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZkb4TPI-Lo

Fluent, inventive and artful swearing is the highest mastery of foreign language to be achieved. If your friend thinks english or any other language lacks expletives or ways to combine them for maximum effect, I am sorry, but your friend knows fuck-all about cultures, languages, and people in general. It is even possible that his mother was a hamster and his father smelled of elderberries (i'm of course, saying that in jest!)

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