Often these words provide insight into the cultures they come from, such as the Brazilian Portuguese word for running your fingers through a lover’s hair, the Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, or the Swedish word for a third cup of coffee. Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don’t have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions.

Lost in Translation: An artistic collection of more than 50 drawings featuring unique, funny, and poignant foreign words that have no direct translation into English.ĭid you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there’s a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? If you come across L ost in Translation An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words somewhere, I would say that you should definitely check it out. The German word is Waldeinsamkeit: the state of being alone in the forest and a kind of connection with nature. The Japanese word Wabi-Sabi: the state of finding beauty in unperfect things and accepting the sense of life and death. The words that impressed me the most were, of course, from Japanese and German. Thanks to Lo st in Translation An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words, I again witnessed how people perceive the world according to their languages. The book includes adorable illustrations, and the meaning of each word is embellished with relevant images. But when I saw words such as Naz, I saw what we added to our language from other languages.

Although the author Ella Sanders tried to include as many languages as she could, unfortunately, I could not find a Turkish word in the book. These words do not have a literal equivalent and are usually translated into other languages with more than one word. Lost in Translation An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words is a book containing many words from various languages.

Lost in translation ella frances