Untranslatable
untranslatable.co
untranslatable.co
One can share "feedback" via Google Docs, though :') yeah, no thanks
Now that you point out the data license, yeah, this project will definitely be dead within two years. No sustainable license and not interesting enough to revisit daily like Mastodon, so it will neither build a community nor a sustainable dataset. It's simple enough that part time support will let it survive in the background for a while, but colour me surprised if the author hasn't fully moved on come 2026
I'm pro open licenses, but you're overstating things. The sheer usefulness and viability of Urban Dictionary attests to the fact that most people don't actually care about licenses.
Urban Dictionary is indeed extremely useful, but I think making this out to be evidence that people don't care is oversimplifying things. As useful as it is, it's still pretty clear that the licensing (along with a few other lacks, open moderation, etc.) severely holds it back from being as comprehensive & accurate a source as it could be. It achieves usefulness through sheer volume: the vast majority of entries on it are nonsense, there's just so many that there are diamonds to be found in the rough.
I certainly agree that UD could be even better, including through better licensing.
But yeah better licensing would still be nice.
It’s a bit of an in-joke repository.
This may actually be a feature, not a bug.
Another way to say that is it might be unwise to let ideological peer pressure coerce you into an open license, under the guise of serving some imagined superset of users who "really want" and "otherwise can't use" that, while ignoring the actual market segment who would happily use your product commercially, and the benefits that such restrictive protection provide.
Open source can be abused to coerce newcomers to surrender any competitive advantage they might compound by using such "imaginary market" and "ideological purity" arguments, when in reality it may just be a tool of incumbents to weaken any competition, by eroding a startup's ability to capture value.
Or in a pithy form: "Go open source! It's bad if you don't" said the Big Bad Wolf Corp to the Little Piggy Startup. "Oh yes, Mr Wolf, anything to please!" said the Little Piggy Startup, trusting the Big Wolf, because, who would want to hurt Little Piggy?
Be cautious before you change anything and consider many options! If your instinct is to stick to stronger protections, then it might be wise to do that!
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</div>For what it is worth, you can visit the explore page through the menu or at untranslatable.co/explore
Therefore, I have no idea how to see slang from one specific country.
And it looks like they do. 49k followers on Facebook and 16k on Instagram. Not sure how far back these go, but looks like very "shareable" content, where they would take I translatable words and make little funny pictures or memes or other intriguing things and post them. Lots of interaction comments/reaction-wise
Timeline-wise this was backed on Kickstarter in 2020. Site launched in summer 2020. The creator was very active on Kickstarter working on communicating and updating the community with what was going on (until the end there).
Also seems to have a Patreon, and worked itself into other places like https://github.com/theimpossibleastronaut/awesome-linguistic...
Otoh the creator learned to program specifically to create this website, so I guess well done her!
Even if it is like you say, it is a remarkable achievement to be able to convince people to invest in your idea.
This really wasn’t the gotcha you thought it was.
My first sentence was legitimate, she’s convinced people to invest in her idea - as you say - and I’m impressed. Perhaps we disagree on where the investment has gone, but hey ho. If you think the site as it stands represents €10k of value then we disagree on that too.
The second sentence was somewhat tongue in cheek (and I’m not a fan of KS in general, been bitten too many times). Well done on jumping straight to name calling/insults though, great way to hold yourself during public discourse.
I actually had a bit of a following on some language-themed meme pages and used that to launch this project on Kickstarter. The Kickstarter was partially to gain some funds (although after rewards, shipping, and taxes it really wasn't a great amount) and partially to see if people were interested in the idea at all, and it turns out they were.
Because right now when I explore the entries, all the definitions are in English. Is this the intent? So it's for English people to find out what international slang words are?
I feel like it would be good to be really clear about your audience.
Maybe one option would be to allow the writing of definitions in multiple languages. Then a user could look up a word, and see all the definitions and find the definition in their language.
For example, I (a Dutch person) just found out about some Brazilian and Panamanian slang. Presumably, a Brazilian or Panamanian person could also find out about Dutch expressions (I saw some Dutch entries).
So the target audience, to me, is quite clear: people from around the world, who are interested in other languages and cultures.
There are various slang dictionaries for specific languages or countries, but as far as I could tell there were none taking slang from different languages and explaining it to foreigners.
Adding definitions in different languages would make the moderation process quite a bit more complicated, and it would also defeat the purpose of explaining slang to an external audience.
When I realized, that, my reaction was, "What!?"
After our trip, I became obsessed with the word for receipt: "fapiao." I thought my inability to tell the difference in the tones was hilarious, but now she refuses to say the word in front of me at all! This is also hard for me to understand. As far as I'm concerned, she's pretty much just saying, "ma" to me 4 times in a row! There's a difference, but it's very difficult! Why is my befuddlement and amusement at that so annoying? There's this Taiwanese comedienne who was talking about being annoyed at her western boyfriend not being able to tell, so apparently that's a thing.
I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones.
I just find that obvious. Wherever I've been in the US, "eyes" is drawn out, but "ice" is short. (Think of imitating a southern accent for "eyes.") The only people I've ever heard saying "eyes" so it sounds like "ice" are native German speakers and other Europeans. (My wife learned German for her Chinese/German comparative lit degree, so the way she says certain things in English sounds menacing to me like how a WWII German movie character says, "We have ways of making you talk!" In particular, when she says, "Your handwriting...looks like WORMS!")
I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones.
I've been playing traditional music for almost 40 years, and I even qualified to compete at what's basically the world competition once. I think it matters most what one got used to as a child.
In German, many syllable-final consonants (in particular, "s") are always voiceless, but the English plural "-s" is voicet (which strangely enough none of my English teachers ever botheret to mention) so if you apply German phonological rules to "eyes" you get something that sounts identical to "ice". But Germans hafe no problem pronouncing "eyes" if the "s" is not syllable-final, e.g. in "Eisen" ("eyesn", iron).
To learn to speak a languache like a natife, you neet to break habits of thought you didn't even know you hat.
Other languages use tone, of course, they just don't use it lexically to distinguish words. I also have played an instrument, etc. but I don't know if that's a factor or not.
Now, pronouncing the tones is a whole other question. My own Mandarin has like 2.5 tones instead of 4, and I struggle to apply tone contours to long phrases without messing up everything involved. Both English and Mandarin have tone contours (and a lot of them are even the same, for example, slowly rising with a sharp rise over the last few syllables = question) but the tone contours of Mandarin interact with the lexical tones of a word. Something we don't have to worry about in English. I doubt I'll ever get enough practice to make that automatic.
Both a Korean teacher of mine and an old housemate (who was a native Russian speaker and had a degree in French) pointed out to me that Americans are "lazy" (that is the technical term, I gathered) about how they use vowels. We get dipthongs confused with pure vowels. Unless it's pointed out to us, we don't think of how we say "oh" as containing an element of "w" at the end.
And tone and vowel quality interact in a complex way, which means you're hearing changes in the vowel, along with the pitches involved.
Ah ha! I think you just helped me! I hadn't been thinking of these two together!
the tone contours of Mandarin interact with the lexical tones of a word. Something we don't have to worry about in English.
Tone of voice is diabolically subtle, the way British and American speakers use it. About half the time, we're using it to indicate the opposite or almost opposite meanings of words. My wife from Fujian doesn't think of speech in quite the same way. We got into an argument, because she kept shouting, "BE CAREFUL!" every time someone cut me off in downtown SF traffic. It took me awhile to understand that she was just frightened and was telling me to be careful. ("HOW COULD YOU TWIST SUCH A TENDER EXPRESSION OF CARE!?" -- Which she said in that tone of voice.)
Tones don't occupy the same part of my brain as parts of vowels. It's more like a musical soundtrack accompanying the dialog.
In those contexts, "Donc" is more like, "Word!" or "Right on." I would translate those to mean, "Agreed."
Or is that just French that French teachers and textbooks talk about to students in America?
I think the meaning of "Agreed" or "Right on" is rare and more implicit. Like saying "therefore" might mean "I accept the premise".
As a question, "donc?", like "so?", can mean "and then?", "then what?", "meaning what?", "what next?" or "so what?"
As an interjection or at the beginning of a sentence, "donc", like "so", can mean "now then", "that said", "moving on" or "without further ado".
I basically never hear that as a standalone reply in English!
As an interjection or at the beginning of a sentence, "donc", like "so", can mean "now then", "that said", "moving on" or "without further ado".
I'm not sure, but I think sometimes when my wife is saying, "schma" it's somewhat like "donc" you describe above. But sometimes, I think she expressing agreement with a person that a third party was a bit mistaken or off the mark, so it's expressing a kind of disagreement. Not sure.
That would be 什麼 shén me, pronounced exactly as you described
You stole his pen?
_You_ stole his pen? -> It was you who stole his pen?
You _stole_ his pen? -> You in fact stole his pen, it was not given willingly?
You stole _his_ pen? -> You stole his pen, and not someone else's?
You stole his _pen_? -> You stole his pen, and not something else of his?
Read my other comments. You'll find I'm already talking about this!
Ok, so it's totally not a rising intonation to me! Wherever you have the _x_, it's emphasis. "Rising" is about the most confusing way to describe it, from my point of view as a layperson.
Also, as I point out elsewhere, the way you are talking about "intonated" sentences is more akin to an accompanying soundtrack, where there's a "stinger" played at the moment something significant is said. It's not a part of the vowel!
EDIT: Okay, I've been working this out saying it to my self. There's nothing "rising" in "you" when I say "_You_ stole the pen?" The volume doesn't rise through the word. The pitch doesn't rise through the word. The only thing that rises in the whole sentence is the pitch approaching the last part of the sentence to indicate a question.
If "rising" is the actual terminology, then that's the most misleading terminology I can think of!
I'll admit I also have musical training, so it makes sense _to me_ to think of pitch in these terms. Maybe it doesn't to most people.
I see how that could be, the words are very close, the ‘y’ sound is very brief, but it helped me understand how something that is so clear for a native speaker could be very difficult for a foreigner to hear.
That being said - entries are not organized by the latest addition, so there are more entries from the past few years.
"Not here to fuck spiders"
Asked an Ausie mate if it was real, and he confirmed he uses it often, as in:
"Look mate, we're not here to fuck spiders, might as well just crack on."
As I’ve gotten older (many years past high school now), I care less about finding and sharing vulgar terms with friends. But, when I come across language on social media that I don’t understand, I want a guide. Fail me that, and I won’t return.
Pull the ten most common (but missing) definitions from Urban Dictionary daily and provide a clean room definition. That would serve as a good litmus for the sorts of censorship we could expect.
Is it even legal for a site to call itself "[an] urban dictionary"?
AFAIK "Urban Dictionary" refers to one thing: urbandictionary.com, no?
Would love for this to grow!
I think it's really neat since there are thousands of foreign words that cannot be translated into English or Korean (Languages I speak), and it takes a quite of time just to really understand what those words mean.
they're past the end because the first parameter is a giant "authenticity token" base64 blob. you'd think this is maybe important, but removing it doesn't appear to affect the request at all
But I don't think I could guess the meaning of "0800" in Brazilian Portuguese...
:-)
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some spiders to wine and dine