(Which I’ll never understand because fruit cake is AMAZING, especially after my grandmother cuts it up and drizzles a teaspoon of brandy over each slice.) Just enough to intrigue any non-translation-mined reader, but not too heavy or scary to make them scream and run to hide as if the thing had just turned into a snake, or a (seasonally appropriate) fruit cake. Complete with fun and colorful illustrations, a “summary” of the respective word’s meaning, and a definition thereof, the book is a great way to show off the intricacies, difficulties, and even beauties of what it takes and means to translate from one language to another. One word doesn’t do it justice it’s so much more than just that one word.Įlla Frances Sanders’s Lost in Translation is a little coffee-table type book that explores just these kids of words from various languages across the globe. It’s the type of cold, damp, seep-into-your-bones autumn or winter rainy weather that chills you to your very core and sticks around for a while even after you’ve made it to warmer surroundings. Just a few days ago, for me, this was the Latvian word “drēgns,” which a dictionary will decipher as “damp,” “cold,” “clammy,” or “chilly“-when in fact, it’s all of these words at the same time, and then some. Hello and greetings in the 2017 holiday season!įor those of you still looking for something to gift a friend or family member this winter season, or if you’re on the lookout for something to gift in the future, or even if you’re looking for something small and fun to gift to yourself-and especially if you want to break the ice in terms of the topic of translation (maybe you’re still trying to get your family on-board with your affection for translated literature and languages, either as a career or a reading preference? maybe it’ll be easier than getting them to accept your middle-aged jam-band aspirations or that questionable tattoo idea you still believe is representative of who you really are?) I wanted to take a quick moment to recommend something I myself was recently gifted: Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World.Īs a translator, it’s often that I find myself in a group of translator friends in which someone brings up an “untranslatable” word in a language he or she is working from. Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World by Ella Frances Sanders
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