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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about examples. I know many languages do not have word::word translations, but a concept that cannot be translated -- even if it needs a full sentence, is a very different thing.

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There are words/concepts that require you to have lived in that culture for some amount of time to understand the cultural baggage connected to the word, and how the word actually describes a part of the culture. As a Swede, one such word for me is `lagom`, which is often translated as `just right`, but this is a cop-out that doesn't do it justice.

To understand it you must know, on a deeper level why a Swede values things being lagom, and this is surprisingly hard to put into words because it involves history, language, value systems, social patterns and even concepts like gratitude towards simple things. This word encapsulates a really big aspect of Swedish culture, making it impossible to translate accurately.

It's like how the Inuit have 35 words for "snow", or the Swedish have 51 words for "tax evasion". Some cultures have a need for nuances that necessarily gets reflected into the local language, nuances which will be lost when bluntly translating into the one category-level word in English.

The Inuit example is a common misconstrual [0]. The ancestor language has three root words that they might modify with a suffix in the way we might use a phrase 'snow on the ground'.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow

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