Untranslatable words

Last week, we celebrated the European Day of Languages (26th September) and International Translation Day (30th September) along with our patron saint, St Jerome. To celebrate these events, the Council of the European Union released a series of short clips with "untranslatable" words in several European languages. You can have a look at these videos on the Council's Twitter and Facebook accounts.

I had the pleasure of contributing to one of these videos with a Romanian "untranslatable" word: struțocămilă, a word that comes from the Latin term for ostrich, but that literally translates to ostrich-camel in Romanian. Have a look at the video to find out what it actually means.

“It is the task of the translator to release in his own language that pure language that is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work.”

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

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