Friedrich Nietzsche said, “Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the absolute truth.”
Translation is so difficult because a culture invests words with nuance and history and a sense of shared place and time that other cultures and languages cannot fully express. Here is a list of eleven untranslatable words. Do you have words for these things in your language? Can you think of any words in your language that are equally untranslatable?
I have two: “ubuntu” and “geselligheid”.
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