The Bible Keeps Getting Translated into English - Again and Again and Again...

[MineralMan]

9. Not readily at hand. This was all decades ago.

One of my prized possessions is a Soviet era Dictionary of Idiomatic Expressions. Two thick volumes full of phrases that make no sense to English speakers but do to Russians. Similies and metaphors that reference Russian life. I've resisted selling it, but it's rare. There's an entire page on the symbolism of the Russian word for "apple," for example, with literary references and examples. All in academic Russian. It's a slog to use, but pretty amazing.

In English, a phrase like, "hit a homer" is meaningless if literally translated into a language of a place that doesn't know baseball, for example. "Hit it out of the park" is another. All languages have many such cultural idioms that don't translate well.