This is partly because it's a logogram-based language, meaning that a character represents a word. DIAN NAO // ELECTRIC BRAINĬhinese can seem quite poetic to non-native speakers. There’s “glowing pear” for light bulb, “go wheel” for bicycle, and “into-the-groundening” for funeral. Itchy Feet, a travel and language comic by Malachi Ray Rempen, illustrates some of the amusing results when German is translated word for word into English. According to the Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic , the Arabic word for cancer stems from a root word meaning “to grab/to swallow,” which yielded the word for lobster. “Cancer of the sea” seems like a harsh moniker for a humble crustacean, but this appears to be another case of multiple meanings.
Popcorn is “jumping corn,” a chameleon is “step softly,” and a weed is “look around tobacco.” 9. PAPIER VAMPIER // PAPER VAMPIREĪs The South African notes, there are several Afrikaans words that simply sound funny when they’re translated directly into English. Smorgasbord, which has been adopted into English, starts to make a little more sense when it's interpreted as a sandwich table, or more generally, a buffet offering various dishes.
( Smör also means butter, making smörgås mean either "butter goose" or "butter butter.") Smörgås is taken to mean “bread and butter,” and thus a sandwich. The word gås literally translates to goose, but the Online Etymology Dictionary notes that it also carries a second meaning: a clump (of butter). While this may sound slightly off-putting to English speakers, many Germanic languages use the same word for “warts” and “nipples,” according to The Economist. Why invent a new word when toes are basically the fingers of the feet? At least that seems to be the logic behind the conjoining of these two words in Portuguese, French, Arabic, and a number of other languages. It’s also sometimes called amuse-gueule, meaning the same thing. This one doesn’t translate perfectly into English because the French truly have a monopoly on food terminology, but an amuse-bouche is basically a bite-sized hors d’oeuvre (appetizer, but literally “outside of work”). There's some crossover between Mandarin and Cantonese, two of the main languages spoken in China, but this term is solely used among Cantonese speakers, particularly in Hong Kong.
It allegedly stems from greedy priests who, upon receiving the dish from locals, scarfed it down so quickly that they choked, according to BBC Good Food. The legend of how this noodle got its name is just as twisted as the pasta itself. A shark is a “fat fish,” a skunk is a “stink fox,” and a baboon is a “monkey head dog,” which sounds like a terrifying mythical creature you wouldn’t want to cross paths with. Many of the Vietnamese words for animals sound as if a group of comedians went to a zoo and started roasting every creature they saw. In this spirit, we’ve selected 25 of our favorite foreign words and their weird and wonderful literal translations. On the other hand, when done correctly, word-for-word translations-also known as literal or direct translations-can help language learners understand a word’s origin while also providing interesting insight into how different cultures perceive ordinary objects. (See: The Iraqi hotel whose buffet sign misidentified meatballs as “ Paul is dead.”) It's easy to tell when text has been fed through an online translator because certain words and phrases tend to get jumbled up in the process, as evidenced by the many mistranslations posted online every day. Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language knows that translator apps, while helpful, aren’t always reliable.
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