Unique Terms In Different Languages

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Axon
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Unique Terms In Different Languages

Postby Axon » Sun Nov 11, 2018 7:28 am

In Morgana's recent post about Swedish, there was a tiny link at the bottom to a curated wordlist for multiple languages called KELLY.

Inside that page I found an entry for:

"list of unique Swedish items, i.e. items never used by translators from other languages into Swedish (can be downloaded here soon)"

I am disinclined to believe that such a download link will ever appear, but the thought is very interesting.

I've seen it generally agreed before that translated literature is easier to read because it deals with things you are probably already familiar with. A novel translated to Chinese from English probably won't talk about "losing face" for instance.

Does anyone know about other lists of words or phrases that are so culturally-specific as to never appear in translated works?
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Re: Unique Terms In Different Languages

Postby rdearman » Sun Nov 11, 2018 9:09 am

Axon wrote:A novel translated to Chinese from English probably won't talk about "losing face" for instance

The novel Taipan by James Clavell would. :D
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Re: Unique Terms In Different Languages

Postby patrickwilken » Sun Nov 11, 2018 11:01 am

Axon wrote:Does anyone know about other lists of words or phrases that are so culturally-specific as to never appear in translated works?


I just finished reading a book by Borges, and a note about translation at the back said that he had trouble with various racist expressions used in some of the stories, some of which were not directly translatable into English, and some which sounded quite different in English (e.g., the N-word).
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