TED:
It’s a piece of cake. You can’t put lipstick on a pig. Why add fuel to the fire? Idioms are those phrases that mean more than the sum of their words. As our Open Translation Project volunteers translate TED Talks into 105 languages, they’re often challenged to translate English idioms into their language. Which made us wonder: what are their favorite idioms in their own tongue?
Many of these are even more nonsensical in English. My favourite is, “You sing like an elephant farted in your ear!” Hat tip to Lori Taber.
Two I learned in German class translate literally to “You have a little man in your ear.” And, “You don’t have all your cups in your cupboard.”
Is that kind of like our “A few fries short of a Happy Meal” or “not the sharpest knife in the drawer”? 🙂
I used to be bothered that there seem to be so many foreign words or idioms that cannot be easily expressed in English. That is until I learned there is no equivalent in Chinese to the English phrase, “We don’t eat that part of the chicken.”
I love the first Russian one. “There’s no need to go galloping across Europe!” I wonder if anyone’s said that to Vladimir Putin lately…