Found in Translation

Cow Dung for Bouncy Curls
Hair care company Clairol launched a curling iron called the Mist Stick in the United States in 2006.
The product did very well—so well that they decided to sell it in other countries, too. The
problem? In German-speaking countries, the word Mist means “manure.” It didn’t sell so well in
those markets. (And if you’re a fan of Sierra Mist soda, now you also know why you won’t find it
when traveling in Germany.)
Color-Blind and Tongue-Tied
Colors are among the first things that you learn in most languages, whether
you’re learning natively as a child or studying a second language. So they
should be the easiest things to translate, right? Not exactly. Take the Spanish
word guindo. How to say it in English? Reddish brown? Red wine? Cranberry?
Reddish purple? Burgundy? The term means “sour cherry” in Spanish, but it’s
difficult to come up with the exact color in English. Cherry on its own brings a
brighter color to mind, but dark red doesn’t quite cut it either.
Generally, one can translate a color like guindo by using more descriptive
language instead of using a single word to translate it directly. But some
languages present even greater challenges. For example, how do you translate
a word that can mean either blue or green? A surprising number of languages
have a word that can mean both. Linguists actually use the word grue to refer to
this phenomenon. It’s more common than you might think. Languages with
small populations of speakers, like Navajo, Tzeltal, and Tarahumara, all have a
word that can mean both blue and green. But even languages with millions of
speakers have grue-like notions. In Vietnamese, the color word xanh can be
used to describe either the sky or the leaves of trees. In Thai, the word
means “green” but can also be used to describe the sky. In Japanese and
Korean, there is not always a clear distinction between green and blue. In both
languages, a green traffic light can also be called a blue light.

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Not only are colors not simple to translate but they are not universal either.
A language spoken in the Philippines, Hanuno’o, has words for just four
colors—black, white, red, and green. Pirahã, a language of the Amazon, has no
specific words to convey color but uses comparisons instead—for example,
instead of saying “red,” they say an item looks “like blood.”
Tempted to think that a lack of words for color is somehow indicative of a
“primitive” or less-developed language? Consider the fact that Latin originally
had to borrow the words for gray and brown from Germanic languages.
Ancient Hebrew had no word for blue. Some languages have richer palettes for
certain colors than others—for example, Navajo distinguishes between the
black associated with darkness and the one used for the color of coal. Spanish
has many words for brown. Brown hair is castaño, brown skin and sugar are
moreno, brown bears are pardo (the word pardo is sometimes described as a
grayish brown in English and is also used to describe overcast skies), other
brown animals are marrón, and yet the word café (same as the word for coffee)
is the generic word for brown.
Conveying color words from English into other languages is not always
straightforward either. Just consider the fact that black tea is known as red tea
in Chinese. But we don’t even have to cross languages to find examples of
color confusion: white wine is not really white but pale yellow, and red wine is
more of a maroon. So in many languages, the words for red and white do not
appear in the translation for these wines. Also, in English, we refer to one’s
skin color with terms such as white and black, even though a white person’s
skin is not white but a pale shade of pinkish peach, and the skin we refer to as
black can be many different shades of brown—not the actual color black.
So the next time you walk into your local pharmacy and see twenty different
shades of hair dye for would-be redheads sitting on the shelves, consider the
poor translator who has to come up with creative ways to convey “sunset
auburn,” “glowing auburn,” “radiant auburn,” “fairest auburn,” and so on.