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The "winning" example reminded me very forcefully of "hrung".
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OK, Max. Spill. What's with hrung?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Since you asked:
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Ford Prefect's original name is only pronuncible in an obscure Betelgeusian dialect, now virtually extinct since the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758 which wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven. Ford's father was the only man on the entire planet to survive the Great Collapsing Hrung disaster, by an extraordinary coincidence that he was never able satisfactorily to explain. The whole episode is shrouded in deep mystery: in fact no one ever knew what a Hrung was nor why it had chosen to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven particularly. Ford's father, magnanimously waving aside the clouds of suspicion that had inevitably settled around him, came to live on Betelgeuse Five where he both fathered and uncled Ford; in memory of his now dead race he christened him in the ancient Praxibetel tongue.
Because Ford never learned to say his original name, his father eventually died of shame, which is still a terminal disease in some parts of the Galaxy. The other kids at school nicknamed him Ix, which in the language of Betelgeuse Five translates as "boy who is not able satisfactorily to explain what a Hrung is, nor why it should choose to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven".
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RIP DNA.
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Here's the link to the original survey; it also includes the "ten" most untranslatable English words (yet there seem to be only nine): 1 plenipotentiary 2 gobbledegook 3 serendipity 4 poppycock 5 googly 6 Spam 7 whimsy 8 bumf 9 chuffed http://www.todaytranslations.com/index.php/fuseaction/home.content/page/press
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Maybe they're counting shlimazl.
I'll offer this for an American translation of 'googly':
change-up.
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veteran
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So, untranslatable means that there is no one-to-one correspondence between word a in language X with word b in language Y? That seems a given. All words are equally untranslatable. OTOH, all the words quoted were translated rather well in the article, but using more than one word for the translation. These thousand linguists need to get out more. Though, maybe thousand was used in the National Socialist sense of the word, i.e., a dozen.
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Well, I was wondering, if gezellig is glossed as the Dutch for cosy, how is it untranslatable unless it doesn't mean cosy at all? If this article was being written in Dutch, would cosy make the list and be glossed as gezellig?
Bingley
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