Beautiful Untranslatable Words from around the World

Aims of the tool

To contribute to developing one's multilingual competence.

Description of the tool

Different cultures have different beliefs and concepts of perceiving and understanding life and the world. As a result, different cultures and their languages sometimes have words denoting things, feelings or moments that are not named in other languages, which makes them difficult or impossible to translate in a simple way.

These are often words that are loaded with emotions, and learning about their meaning is not only a way of improving your multilingual competence and expanding your vocabulary of a certain language, but they are also a beautiful way of learning how to notice and appreciate unique and special moments that otherwise we don't usually recognize or pay attention to.

Being untranslatable, finding definitions of the exact meaning of these words requires checking various online dictionaries, googling and searching for explanations accompanied by images.

Instructions:
Give the participants a piece of paper with one or several of the untranslatable words provided in the file attached below and ask them to search for its meaning on the Internet. Tell them to check several sources and to write down one meaning that can combine various explanations of the meaning of the word.

After they have completed the task, you can discuss whether similar words and concepts exist in their own language and culture.

In the other file attached below, you can find explanations of the meanings of all these words.