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Language Translation: German, Spanish, French, Japanese

German translation examples include the word Reinheit, which has a wider meaning than the word purity. The word ergiebig is another example, meaning delivering quality and efficiency, or more for the same money.


Professional English Spanish translators will point out that the word placer means much more than the English translation pleasure. It includes pleasure while eating, enjoyment, sharing a social event, softness, warmth, the good life, contentment, and satisfaction. Some words represent interpersonal relations of one culture that do not exist in others.


The best French translators will point out that savoirfaire and savoir vivre include a vast array of values specific to French culture and cannot be properly translated. The Japanese expression for "computer graphics" carries the meaning of a picture, a drawing, and illustration or sketch, but not of a graph. Another example is the Japanese word for "animation," which in translation carries the meaning of "comics" or "cartoons."25 In translations for Japan, the word for "heart" associates with "warmth," not necessarily with "love," as love is not expressed the same as in the Western world. There are no proper equivalents to the words identity and personality in Japanese language translations, as the concept of personality separate from the social environment is alien to the Japanese people.

Untranslatable concepts often are so meaningful to members of a specific culture that they are effective elements of advertising copy. They refer to collective memory. This implies that words that are labels of culturally meaningful concepts are too ambiguous to use in international campaigns. This can be so in Chinese technical translation services. A European campaign for the KitKat candy bar was based on the concept of the "break": "Take a break, take a KitKat." The break was an English institution: the 11 o'clock morning tea break, when working people had their morning tea, and brought a KitKat as a snack. Because of this, KitKat in the United Kingdom was called "Elevenses." This type of break did not exist in any other country in Europe - not in Spain, not in France, not in Germany - so the break concept had to be "translated" in a different way for the other countries. Continental Europeans do not have the same "break" memory as do the British.

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