why special ambassador, you're really spoiling us!
Gezellig up to your monitor for a second, as unless you’re a complete klloshar, I’d like to share my favourite news story of the day with you.
It’s on the top ten most untranslatable words. The winner is ilunga from the Bantu language of Tshiluba, and means a person ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, ( Read more... )
It’s on the top ten most untranslatable words. The winner is ilunga from the Bantu language of Tshiluba, and means a person ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, ( Read more... )
"A leapfrog appeal is an interesting bit of the English legal system: in a case of sufficient public importance, the appeal may go straight from the High Court to the House of Lords, bypassing the Court of Appeal. But how to translate it? The game of leapfrog is Bockspringen in German (literally, deer-jumping) saute-mouton in French (sheep-jump.)"
In the same survey of 1000 professional translators by a company that wants the publicity, "'leapfrog appeal' was voted the hardest English term to translate, closely followed by 'toxic tort' (harmful exposure to a poisonous chemical.) Other troubling legal arcana included 'Michaelmas term' (court sittings between November 2 and 25.)
"Untranslatable words, especially from big widely used languages, often migrate untranslated: panache and schadenfreude are now English words, le weekend and das Briefing are embedded in French and German. But from smaller languages, things can be tricky. Esperanto, for example, has a verb krokodili meaning "to speak your native language when everyone else is speaking Esperanto" - more euphonious than useful, perhaps.
"The survey highlighted ten particularly difficult such words. Top of the list came ilunga, [as described above] closely followed by shlimazl, Yiddish for a chronically unlucky person. Like a legal translator, perhaps."
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