CULTURAL CONCEPTS BEYOND ENGLISH: TRANSLATION, WORLDVIEW, AND THE LIMITS OF EXPLANATION
Keywords:
Cultural concepts, untranslatability, language and culture, lexical semantics, worldview, intercultural communication.Abstract
This article examines cultural concepts from different languages that are difficult to explain in English. The study is based on an informal corpus of online comments in which speakers shared words, expressions, and cultural practices that they considered hard to translate. The article does not treat these comments as dictionary definitions, but as examples of folk metalinguistic awareness: ordinary speakers reflecting on the relationship between language, culture, and meaning. After excluding offensive, vulgar, purely humorous, and politically charged examples, the article focuses on concepts such as saudade, hiraeth, sobremesa, hygge, lagom, sisu, tarof, ubuntu, kapwa, firgun, apapacho, gezelligheid, and meraki. The analysis shows that these concepts are difficult to explain in English not because English is poor or limited, but because languages divide emotional, social, ethical, and everyday experience in different ways. The difficulty lies not only in vocabulary, but also in cultural practice, shared assumptions, and social context.
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