Untranslatability
Jul 16th, 2009 | By Vitoria | Category: English
Ever since I started a job related to translation I have been facing many words that are very hard to translate into Portuguese – most of them related to IT, like ‘bug’, ‘widget’ and so on. Of course I could explain what they mean, but so far I haven’t been able to find a word in Portuguese that would sound nice and describe exactly what these words mean.
I tried to think about other words that don´t have a direct translation and came across a list on the Internet compiled by the company Today Translations and published by the BBC. They show the 10 hardest words in the world to translate. Take a look:
- Ilunga: Word in Tshiluba for a person who is ready to forgive anything the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.
- Shlimazl: Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person.
- Radioukacz: Polish for a person who worked as a telegraph for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain.
- Naa: Word used in the Kansai area of Japan, to emphasize statements or agree with someone.
- Altahmam: Arabic for a deep sadness.
- Gezellig: Dutch for cozy.
- Saudade: Portuguese for a type of longing, missing something or someone.
- Selathirupavar: Tamil for a certain type of truancy.
- Pochemuchka: Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions.
- Klloshar: Albanian word for loser.
Source: http://www.robsmegaphone.com/2008/07/19/the-worlds-most-difficult-word-to-translate-loses-much-in-translation/
I asked my colleagues that speak some of those languages what the words really mean. The girl from Poland said she never heard the word "Radioukacz". The Russian defined “Pochemuchka” as a “hindi kindi word for someone who asks "why" all the time” (his definition of hindi kindi is “little kids”). He says he is not sure it is even a word, since it became famous through a soviet cartoon – but he couldn´t find only one word in English for it anyway.
Now for the word in Portuguese, “Saudade”. I knew I would have a hard time defining it. Since I was a kid I learned in school that this is our unique word in Portuguese and that no other language has a word for that. Well, I could somehow find a translation from that into English, into German and into Spanish but I can´t help but wondering if they really describe what “saudade” is all about.
Hello, thank you for your blog. When I first started working for PLG-ONLINE, I have been in similar situation, but my problem is translating very technical English words into Spanish. Some things are just not used in the Spanish Language. But thanks to the translation memory software that we use, we only have to find a translation for the word once.
If you were to try to translate “saudade”, what would be something close to that? In Spanish?
Raudel