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'Illunga' tops ten toughest words that leave translators tongue-tied
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Thread poster: Wenke Geddert

'Illunga' tops ten toughest words that leave translators tongue-tied

Richard Benham

France
Local time: 01:48
German to English
+ ...

wistfulness?

May 24, 2007

Wistfulness is said to be one of the toughest English words to translate.

There are countless words in German, like schon, for instance, that are very often best ignored in translation. (I often tell people who are having trouble with these words that German speakers tend to feel that no sentence is complete without at least one short, generally meaningless, adverb. Others claim that these words, although they may be adverbs in other contexts, are actually “modal particles”. When in doubt, create a new category. ) Similarly with, say, en effet in French. And Modern Greek has a whole heap of “untranslatables”, as did Classical Greek, now that I think of it. δε, anyone?

Lola Garcia Abarca

Spain
Local time: 01:48

Member (2011)
Spanish to English

tramitar and tener confianza

Sep 11, 2007

Lesley Clarke wrote:

Ilunga! What a lovely word and it does illustrate the idea that language helps you to think, a la George Orwell.
I think if we could adopt Ilunga into the English language we could encourage some people to be more tolerant and other people to put a limit on their tolerance.

My pet bug-bear in Spanish is trámite and tramitar, for some reason I always have to look it up and then think a lot. Trámite and tramitar are the essence of Mexican bureaucracy, and I suppose that the best word for them is paperwork, but it seems too casual a word for the type of documents I have to translate.

I use "to process" and "paperwork" for formal and informal contexts respectively.
I sometimes have a problem with "tener confianza con alguien", as in the "level" of the bond of friendship one has with another.

[Edited at 2007-09-11 10:40]