Words With No Translation
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Words With No Translation

Story7 min read The GambiaEnglish

What is lost when a term is rendered into English.

Kinship terms, forms of respect and words for obligation resist translation because English has no equivalent social structure to attach them to.

Twelve terms are examined with the speakers who insisted they be left untranslated in the archive.

The archive's rule follows from this: recordings stay in the language they were spoken in.

Photographs

From this recording

Words With No Translation — photograph 1
Words With No Translation — photograph 2
Words With No Translation — photograph 3

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