What ‘translation problems’ aren’t: here’s an amazing German word that describes the smell of spring !! No other language has a direct translation of this word !!
What ‘translation problems’ are: there are thirty different words to denote ‘levels of intimacy’ of a given relationship in terms of friendship in Polish, and the strongest one seems to translate to ‘friend’, which makes social interactions with English-speakers very confusing when they start calling you a friend 30 minutes in, and you feel like they’ll get lowkey offended if you call them anything else back, and you feel either fake if you refer to them internally as ‘friend’, or extremely cold if you refer to them internally as ‘acquaintance’
Yes, this. This bugs me a lot too, since I write in English. Like, for you, English-speakers, pretty much anyone who isn’t your enemy is your friend, and when I want to show how two characters had grown close to each other in a platonic way, a relationship where in Polish one would call the other przyjaciel (a less close friend we call znajomy), I walk into a wall in English.
I could use ‘best friend’, but again I hit my forehead, because in Polish najlepszy przyjaciel is a super, super extraordinary term that most people won’t ever have an opportunity to use, and it can only describe one person, and I usually want my characters to have a few very close friends, and it just rings wrong in my head…
Like, can’t you guys just make my work easier and start actually using the word ‘colleague’?
Indian languages and Korean… family member names are such a trip that the generic English “aunt and uncle” are too weak and don’t describe the family that accurately at all.
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