The World’s Most Untranslatable Word

The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as ‘ilunga’ from the Tshiluba language," spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, says BBC News. The word won a poll conducted among a thousand linguists. Ilunga means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time." Another high scorer was naa, a Japanese word used only "in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone." According to Jurga Zilinskiene, managing director of the translation and interpreting agency that commissioned the poll, "people sometimes forget that an interpreter . . . must translate not just from one language to another but from one culture to another, [and] sometimes, the equivalent idea just does not exist in both cultures."