Untranslatable Feelings
(5-minute read)
How granular can you get with describing your feelings? How does it feel to be missing feelings-words? If you don’t have the adjective for a feeling, can you still feel it? Then, what feelings have you felt without having the language to express them? And crucially, how did you process those slippery, can’t-quite-put-your-finger-on-it feelings?
Angelina Trâm Nguyễn, a bilingual parent who spoke Vietnamese as a child and now also English as an adult, is faced with these questions whilst supporting her child’s language acquisition and emotional literacy. In her poignant blog post (seriously, read it), she writes, “Oftentimes I can’t name my own feelings in Vietnamese (what is the word for ‘frustrated’?)”. In communicating “tenderness, love, or rich emotions”, she struggles to find concise and accurate Vietnamese adjectives. This isn’t to say that Vietnamese is an unexpressive language; its dictionary carries ample words that don’t exist in English. Such words are, pertinently, translated and reduced to the closest equivalent. For example, ‘Bâng khuâng’ is generally translated to mean ‘melancholy’, though its actual meaning is closer to ‘A kind of dazed sad sense of missing something or someone… but you don’t quite know what it is and you’re just riding it out’ (if you can think of a word for that in English, do let the Vietnamese-English dictionaries know).
Pointing fingers is naïve in the game of Language Top Trumps – it’s difficult to notice what powers your own language lacks until you learn a second one, or indeed, until you teach your own language as a smaller foreign language. Languages with larger dictionaries than English regularly back us into the comical corner of apologetically higgledy-piggledy translations. My sister, who teaches English to students in South Korea, finds joy in the 400,000-word disparity between English and Korean. She messages me with questions like, ‘Do you know the word for how sunlight reflects off the ocean?’, ‘Is there a name for your mum’s friend’s child?’ and ‘Do we have an actual word for ‘ner ner nee ner ner?’. In case you’re wondering, the answer in all cases is, ‘Yes, in Korean’.
For practical terms that can’t be described in a single word, we happily use more. While other languages use single words, we’re content sticking with ‘your mum’s friend’s kid’, ‘tapping someone on the shoulder to get them to look in the wrong direction’, or even ‘love at first sight’. Even between majority English-speaking countries, words can get lost – my Aussie partner was incredulous to find out that we Brits call the gate that lifts up to let your car out when you leave the car park, well, ‘the gate that lifts up to let your car out when you leave the car park’ (most Aussies would know it as a ‘boom gate’). Generally though, verbosity is not a distraction to the native-English speaker.
The problem comes with elusive, intangible, indescribable adjectives specifically for smells feelings. In some cases, we’re halfway there with noun phrases like ‘second-hand embarrassment’ and ‘cuteness overload’. Still, we’re a long way from covering it all; we don’t even have a word for ‘feelings adjectives’.
It’s satisfying and empowering to learn a word for a feeling and, in doing so, identify the capacity for that feeling within oneself. The resfeber of leaving for a new home. The wabi sabi your friend feels as she works a means-to-an-end job she hates, and the schadenfreude she feels as she watches her cruel manager drop a tray of coffees. I want to know every feelings-adjective from every language so I can observe, acknowledge, and process them all with mind-altering clarity. Or maybe I should just meditate more.