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Does Not Translate

doesnottranslate.com

14 pointsthrowup2388 comments

Tons of the Dutch "untranslatables" do have English translations, most of the obvious and straight-forward. And some of the descriptions are just dead wrong.

Take this with a grain of salt. A big grain of salt. Actually, just assume everything you read is bollocks. Low-effort blogspam to sell affiliate links.

It's junk, I'm a monolingual English speaker and some of the untranslatable English words aren't even real words. For instance: "Pleurigloss" (https://doesnottranslate.com/pleurigloss/). As best I can tell that's a fictional word from a recent (2016) TV show episode.

Edit: And I noticed most of it's just scraped from a subreddit: look at the "source" links. Many of those posts even have responses explaining how they're not untranslatable.

Yeah, similar in Polish. Some really decent ones (well known but truly unique) but also some with easy dictionary translations ("zepsuć"), with bad translations on the site or just no translation at all ("no" - why bother putting it there?).

was thinking the same https://doesnottranslate.com/zwaartekracht/

"zwaartekracht" literally means "gravity"

i second this for other languages in particular, and for the whole concept of untranslatability in general anyway

words overlap differently from one language to the other and some words might need a circumlocution but it is not untranslatable

I agree there is often a lot more nuance, but I don't entirely agree that the entire concept doesn't exist. For example there is no word for "sibling" in Dutch, and some of the entries on that list such as "koukleum" (person who quickly feels cold) don't really have good translations to English. It's not "untranslatable" in the strict sense (I just translated it here), but there is no analogous word and it's "untranslatable" in the colloquial sense.

Either way, I think a site like this could be a really interesting, if it was written well, with appropriate context and nuance. I would also choose a very different list (I drafted an article for this years ago, and it has 0% overlap).

This is the same for russian

I had no idea

https://doesnottranslate.com/bifler/

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