Have you ever come across those lists of untranslatable words from other languages?
Just search ‘untranslatable words’ online and you’ll find a treasure trove: ikigai means ‘a reason to live’ in Japanese, anteayer is Spanish for ‘the day before yesterday, waldeinsamkeit is German, meaning ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’.
I love these linguistic peculiarities, but are they ‘untranslatable’? Not really – if they were, we wouldn’t be able to explain what they mean. One translation for waldeinsamkeit is, as above, ‘the feeling of being alone in the woods’; one translation for ikigai is the phrase we already borrow from French, raison d’être. In this context, ‘untranslatable’ often just means it doesn’t have a one-word English equivalent – although anteayer could technically be translated with the one-word (albeit archaic) English equivalent ‘ereyesterday’.
