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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

Is this for words or expressions? Clicking through a few, it seems both. I'm not sure it's fair to say phrases don't translate...they just aren't used word for word. I think single words that have no single word translation in other languages is far more fascinating. Like say, Schadenfreude.

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It's only a single word because the gluing together words is a national German pastime (and, more importantly, a feature of the German language). That makes the distinction of expression vs word somewhat meaningless.

Understood, but even gluing you couldn't come close in say, English. I mean, you could say HarmJoy but without a definition nobody would know what it means. I'd assume self harm. Gluing together words is a neat feature that I wish English did more often.

(Perhaps unsuprisingly) danish does have a single word translation: skadefro

And skadefryd in Norwegian.

I'd argue English has a perfectly fine translation given the right context: "glee".

E.g. He watched her fall with glee.

"Schadenfreude"'s English translation is "schadenfreude".

Or "glee". Glee is just much broader, but given the right context it's a fine synonym.

This seems problematic. "Given the right context" a lot of words could be synonyms. It seems like it's implicit in the meaning of "synonymous" that two words share the same meaning if they're interchangeable (in their respective languages) in all contexts.

Synonyms are rarely exact matches, and even more rarely exact matches without additional context.

Long and extended are synonyms when talking about length, but not family for example.

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