Lost in Translation

Ruchira sent me a lovely press release about a survey of translators and interpretters asking what the most difficult words to translate are.

"And the winner is ILUNGA
A Word In The Bantu Language Of Tshiluba For
A Person Ready To Forgive Any Abuse For The First Time; To Tolerate It A Second Time; But Never A Third Time."

I can't tell which I like better: pochemuchka--Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions--or radioukacz--Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain.

More seriously, it's interesting that two of the top ten have to do with sadness (altahmam, Arabic for a kind of deep sadness and saudade, Portuguese for a certain type of longin) and that only two of the top ten have a positive connotation.