by John Lombaerde
It's been much too long since I posted here, and too long, in fact, since I've blogged on a regular basis.
I do profoundly miss it, and today, I suddenly found myself with an unexpected day off. This is the explanation for my sudden written appearance on this treasured space. I hope my words will be of some brief inspiration, and encourage discussion or thought.
In an effort to not be constrained by my native English, many years ago, I decided as a young college student to venture into a one year junior-year abroad program in the south of France. It was a challenging adventure for me at the time, to leave behind America, and the day to day things to which we are so easily accustomed.
I have never regretted that decision, since it opened my eyes, (if only briefly), to the world of Europe, as well a
s North Africa, during my summer travels to Morocco. I have maintained my interest in French, but I have to admit, I have been more interested in Japanese and Korean for the last 20 years or so. Sadly, my understanding in both languages, is quite poor.
It seems to me that we often fail to take into consideration the limitations of our own language, and in a very brief attempt to broaden our Anglophone perspective, I would like to explore some words that have been found to be difficult or impossible to translate into English.
I am especially interested in words that are difficult to translate from Korean into English. I hope you find this information as interesting as I do.
Koi No Yokan (Japanese): The sense upon first meeting a person that the two of you are going to fall into love.
This is different than “love at first sight,” since it implies that you might have a sense of imminent love, somewhere down the road, without yet feeling it. The term captures the intimation of inevitable love in the future, rather than the instant attraction implied by love at first sight.
Cafuné (Brazilian Portugese): The act of tenderly running your fingers through someone's hair.
Yuanfen (Chinese): A relationship by fate or destiny. This is a complex concept. It draws on principles of predetermination in Chinese culture, which dictate relationships, encounters and affinities, mostly among lovers and friends.
From what I glean, in common usage yuanfen means the "binding force" that links two people together in any relationship.
But interestingly, “fate” isn’t the same thing as “destiny.” Even if lovers are fated to find each other they may not end up together. The proverb, “have fate without destiny,” describes couples who meet, but who don’t stay together, for whatever reason. It’s interesting, to distinguish in love between the fated and the destined. Romantic comedies, of course, confound the two.
Ya’aburnee (Arabic): “You bury me.” It’s a declaration of one’s hope that they’ll die before another person, because of how difficult it would be to live without them.
The online dictionary that lists this word calls it “morbid and beautiful.” It’s the “How Could I Live Without You?” slickly insincere cliché of dating, polished into a more earnest, poetic term.
(Thanks to Pamela Haag at http://bigthink.com/users/pamelahaag)
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Here are some Korean untranslatable words and phrases.
Answering negative questions. I think I’ve confused a lot of teachers and friends by accidentally using the Korean convention of answering negative questions. These questions perplex me and somehow I’ve always been at a loss as to how to answer them unambiguously with a simple “yes” or “no” in English. Some types of negative questions have a certain contextual polarity associated with them that doesn’t necessarily match with what the question is actually asking, so that gets confusing too. In English, I usually end up having to support my yes/no answer with extra verbiage to make it less ambiguous. My logical head prefers the succinct, unambiguous Korean mode of answering negative questions.
To illustrate how confusing it can get, take this example:
Question: Aren’t you Korean?
English: No. (=No, I’m not Korean.)
Korean: No. (=No, you are wrong. I am Korean.)
I’ve always found this an intriguing difference between English and Korean. The “aren’t you…” or “isn’t that/this…” implies a relative degree of certainty in English. A question like “Aren’t you Korean?” translates to something more like, “I’m pretty sure you’re Korean.” So that’s why in English, the “yes” or “no” reply directly addresses the latter statement than the actual question. But in Korean, the sentence reads more like “Are you not Korean?” So the “yes” or “no” reply goes with the “not Korean” part of the sentence.
- 쓸 데 없다: useless, unnecessary, superfluous. I’ve used this phrase a lot in the context of “쓸 데 없는 걱정/말.”
- 고퀄리티: This comes from attaching the Hanja 高 (높을 고, 높이 고) to the English word “quality.” 높다, as you might know, means “to be high.”
Putting it together, 쓸 데 없는 고퀄리티 = ridiculously high quality.
What exactly gets does that mean? I actually see this phrase mostly referring to things that are elaborately well made, but cannot bring the maker any real attention or profit. That is, the time and effort put into making the thing, far exceeds the payoff. For example, a doodle like the one below:
I found an article about the phrase over at
10Asia and it ended with this rather profound statement:
자신에게 쓸 데 없으나 세상을 위해 고퀄리티를 포기하지 않는 이들을 일컬어 우리는 예술가라 부른다.
I’m in constant danger of using these words in the middle of an English conversation.
- 역시: The best English equivalents I can come up with for this word are “naturally,” “obviously,” “as expected,” and “of course” but I still find that situations where that sounds odd in English. 역시 is such a pithy answer to a variety of different scenarios; I do wish there was a single, direct English equivalent. For example, suppose your friend says something like, “콘서트 최고였어! 지드래곤은 진짜 멋있더라!” To which you could very simply reply, “역시” to mean “naturally” or “of course.” But say 지드래곤 was at an interview and said, “이번 생일부터 저의 선물로 돈을 기부하겠습니다.” If you were the interviewer, you could say, “와~~ 역시 지드래곤 씨네요!” which uses 역시 to mean more like, “that’s what I would’ve expected from you.”
- 글쎄: Such a delightfully noncommittal word. It can mean “I guess,” “I dunno,” “maybe,” “not sure” or simply “hmmm.” Just leave it to the listener to figure out what you really mean.
- 헐: Oh yes, the word that perfectly sums up my entire existence! I equate this sound with “OMG WHAT” or “HUH??” or “that’s crazy” – though my friend Yekyung tells me it can also be used when you mean 대~~~박.
- 길치: 길 means “way, street” and 치 is “person” – 길치 is a person with no sense of direction. If only there was a word this succinct in English that describes my condition. On a similar note, 음치, which is 음악 + 치, means a “tone-deaf person.”
- skinship: Technically not Korean, doesn’t keep it from not being awesome. I use PDA as a poor substitute, but skinship is so much better.
- 맞선: The only reason I wish this word existed in English is so I’d be able to better explain the process of Indian arranged marriages to my American friends. In Marathi, there’s a phrase we use that translates to “going to see the boy/girl” which basically means the same thing as 맞선. In fact, the phrase “선 보다” translates beautifully into Marathi but sounds really clunky in English – essentially translating to “meeting each other with the intention of getting married.” I usually explain this to my friends as “a very serious blind date arranged by one’s parents” which doesn’t have quite the same meaning or ring to it.
- 멍: God, I love this word! It’s basically the speechless, zoned-out, eye-glazed-over, “ehhhh” type of expression that you’d find on the face of every student forced to sit through a difficult lecture. It’s ridiculously fun to say too.
- 짝사랑: You could use “crush” but the point is that it’s unrequited and not all crushes are. ”Unrequited love” is a mouthful to say and it doesn’t look quite as romantic when you’re trying to translate song lyrics. What’s even harder to translated is when it’s used as a verb. How does one properly translate 짝사랑 하다? ”To have an unrequited love?” “To love someone one-sidedly?” Neither one really rolls off the tongue.
- 뒷모습: This word makes me groan when I’m translating songs. 뒤 is “back, rear” and 모습 is “figure, image” and together, this word means “appearance from behind.” Sure, you could translate this as “back” or “behind” but it often sounds flat in the context of a song. If I’m feeling poetic, I usually translate 네 뒷모습 as “your retreating figure” but even that sound a bit… blargh.
Of course, these are excluding all those lovely
ideophonic words and
kinship terms which present such troubles for poor amateur translators like me! What are some Korean words you wished existed in English?
(Thanks to Archana for the Korean phrases. Nice job for a non-native Korean speaker)
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All in all, a very nice list of words with particular English translation difficulty. I would add "chinoiserie" from the French to the list.
The origin of the word is from the world of art. It was an appreciation of the complexity of detail and rather imaginary or fantastic, even romantic,Chinese artistic expression. It could have been loosely used to describe any particular art object from China or the East Orient.
In modern colloquial slang, it can mean something that is particularly or overly complicated. Even something particularly or unnecessarily complex as to be nearly incomprehensible. The word could be used to describe a device or even a particular situation that is disproportionate in complexity compared with the purpose or intended meaning.
For example, the entrepreneur gave up trying to do business in the foreign country due to the "chinoiseries", in dealing with all of the local laws and government bureaucracy.
I hope there are not too many words from outside the English language that you find to be "chinoiseries".
Happy writing!
Please visit the following 2 URLS for the background information used in this blog post.
http://bigthink.com/marriage-30/the-top-10-relationship-words-that-arent-translatable-into-english?page=all/
http://panjjakpanjjak.wordpress.com/
