2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44
Can you guess which ones?
An interesting new thread has appeared on Twitter. In it, a girl named @AAluminium gives a list of Russian words, the meaning of which cannot be accurately conveyed in English (at least in one word, not a whole phrase). She decided to talk about this, as opposed to the popular belief that not everything in English can be translated into Russian while preserving the shade of meaning, but Russian is always translated.
1. Longing.
3. Binge.
Does not translate. No way. Nope. Know. You can insert carouse, carousel, but these are still just fun or not so much parties, binge. But don't get drunk.
5. Rudeness.
No, not boldness or audacity, which imply a bullet-bold, harsh behavior. Granny in line at the store is hardly a cocky lioness, is she?
8. Get excited
On the one hand, and flutter, and seemingly rouse from sleep, and now there are a thousand different interpretations, but only everything is not right. Thank you Fet, I send greetings.
13. To lull.
Lull and rock, of course, are about the same, but they don't mean humming songs and so on. This is a stupidly physical act of rocking the cradle, while lulling is muttering something at the same time.
14. The word "keep up".
Yes, you can say manage to do smth, but it's more like "I managed …" or "I made it on time", but still it's not that. I myself use the first structure.
18. I am extremely amused that the word UNLIMITED is untranslatable):
Mayhem would be the closest English equivalent, however, it does not describe the depth of this Russian word, which also means lawlessness, complete disorder and actions that go beyond any laws and moral principles
24. The buzz.
I don’t know how much this is about the Russian language, because the word itself, it seems, came from Arabic and so it remained here.
26. Quite funny that the word meaning is also untranslatable, because combines both meaning and sense
32. Russian feat is not an English feat. Feat literally comes from factum (something has been done), and a feat is to move something, to move something off the ground.
36. Party. Not a patch, but a party. It happened, by the way, from "shuffling the cards", because at the get-together you will communicate with different people like cards in a deck.
38. Beloruchka. As soon as they did not try to translate it, in the end they left the lazy person.
More in. With some words, the readers disagreed and still managed to find a translation for them (often this is a little-known slang or idiom). However, you can always argue that the shade of the meaning is not conveyed in them enough or the structures are too long.
Can you remember some typically Russian words that cannot be fully expressed in another language?
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