Do Idioms Translate? Not Always!

We all know and use many different ways of expressing ourselves, but would those expressions still make sense if translated into other languages?

Literal translation is rarely a good idea—especially when it comes to idioms or culturally rooted sayings. These expressions often lose their meaning when taken word for word. Since I’m Italian, I’ll share some examples by translating English idioms into Italian. Feel free to comment and add examples from your own native language!

These sayings always have a history. They were all born in ancient times thanks to something that was believed or happened at that time. For example “mad as a hatter“, a well-known phrase also from an international point of view thanks to Lewis Carroll’s book and the Walt Disney Production animated fiction film “Alice in Wonderland”. In Italy we say “matto come un cavallo” (“mad as a horse” in English), this is because when a horse goes crazy it’s impossible to calm him down. Why do the English use the word “hatter”? The reason is because in the Victorian Era, the hatters (or hat makers) used to use mercury during their job, a chemical which affected their nervous system (and probably the reason they tended to become mad).

Even if we don’t know the equivalent Italian phrase and we need to translate these particular sentences, there are some cases in which the Italian phrase is just like the English one. For example “cry over spilled milk“ is “piangere sul latte versato” (when we do something wrong and we are sad about it). We say it probably because when the idiom originated, milk was a very expensive and rare product and if it fell down it was a shame.

Another one is “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” (like the Italians use to say, “a caval donato non si guarda in bocca”), this means that you don’t have to criticise or try to find some flaw in something given to you as a gift; you just have to be grateful to that person, even if the gift is not valuable or if we don’t like it. This saying was born because you can figure out how old a horse is just by seeing the condition of his teeth.

Overall, sayings are frequently used in many languages and often understood by the majority, as we adopt them frequently during our informal speeches in order to explain in a figurative and catchy way a concept that would need a large vocabulary to be explained.