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The Art of Inside Out An in-depth look into the making of Pixar’s upcoming animated film, INSIDE OUT, with a foreward by star Amy Poehler. Learn more | See related books
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Best Books of the Month
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Of course, as a writer, I love language--and I'm always looking for that perfect word to reflect an emotion or action. This brief book is filled with perfect words collected from around the globe. It's also a little peek into the soul of different cultures.
While it's generally agreed that English has the most words (according to Bill Bryson's book 'Mother Tongue', English has about 200,000 words in common use, German 184,000 and French 100,000), sometimes it's the magic of that one word that can suddenly shift your perspective to understand something in a truly extraordinary way. And sometimes it's not about being raised to the sublime, but rather about the efficiency of economy. Why use 10 words when you can use one?
Every word is included with a definition and charming illustration by the author. The facing page reiterates the word and definition again, with a short commentary.
Similar to The Book of Awesome, this book will help lift your spirits as it reminds you of the uniqueness of being human.
My favorite word? Mangata. The road-like reflection of the moon in the water.
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I found this book among the list of best illustration books of 2014 chosen by Amazon's editors. Really? It is an enlargement of a blog entry by the same author, which can still be found online, for free, if you google "11 untranslatable words from other cultures", but it is sold at 10+ bucks in Kindle format. A rip off price. Give that money to charity! The book is not worth it.
The author is truly lost in translation, and wants you to get you lost as well. At seeing the ratings, I see she has succeeded.
The introduction is a clear example of pompous vacuous well-intentioned babble that means nothing but wants to impress the general public. Still, I had hopes that this would be, well, just a crappy introduction. Sadly it is not.
How did the author came across some of these non-existent words, and considers some very translatable words untranslatable, is beyond my understanding. This sort of listing is quite popular on the Internet. I came across something really similar in Tumblr a couple of years ago, and it way better! (the blog is called Otherworldly, no illustrations, but more serious and interesting if this subject interests you). Otherwise, just google "untranslatable words into English" and you will find gazillion free entries on the subject, which always come down to the same words.
The Malay word in this book does not exist according to a Malaysian.
I am bilingual in Spanish and "vacilando" (not a verb, but a verb tense, mind you) does not translate that way. The verb "vacilar" has many different meanings, all translatable into English. You never use a gerund on its own, but within a a sentence that has another verb (or the verb is implicit but missing).Read more ›
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As the title says, there are some words than can't be fitted into a one word definition in any language but their own. This book provides a delightful assortment of such treasures. The selection is terrific (most of these are really interesting words), the (multiword) definitions are illuminating, and the pictures are charming. A few of the words are moving into my permanent vocabulary: how about "kummerspeck" (weight gained from emotional overeating), or "komorebi" (sunlight shining through leaves)?
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This is both a terrific concept and a fun book. Here at work we crowded around and chatted about words in other languages and how we planned to start using some of them. The illustrations are a fun addition. It makes for a terrific gift and a great coffee table book. My only critique would be that they do not tell you how to pronounce the words, something usually standard in something like this, hence me giving it 4 stars instead of 5. Still a really intriguing and entertaining read.
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I like this little book. Most of the words seemed to come from the Word Porn site, which is actually fine by me. I learned most of them there, and I bet the author of this book did, or is related to Word Porn in some way.
This is not a reference book - it is the kind of book you read like you might read easy poetry. Poetry with pictures. Just browse through it on a casual basis and be delighted by what you run into.
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No pronunciations? How can anyone look at words in other languages and not even try to think of a way to sound that word. Extremely interesting words, in wide variety of languages. I enjoyed reading this brief book (one word and description/ definition per page) but did not finish it because I found it so extremely frustrating to have no idea how the word would be pronounced. Surely the author could have made some slight effort in that direction, perhaps - even in tiny print - to spell it phonetically. I tried to look at the word and think of it only as a picture (with no sound) but that did not work. So, I gave up, but I was frustrated to stop because the idea of the book is fantastic. And I do admire the author for finding these words in the first place.
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This item: Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World
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