Experiences in Languages and Translation

I don't have much experience with foreign languages and translation, but I do know some people who speak other languages. There are many difficulties when one tries to translate a language. For one, there are different words to describe emotions. This means that not all emotional words have the same meaning. The German word for lonely would most likely describe a different emotion than the English meaning of the word. There are also other words for emotions that don't translate into other languages at all because there just isn't a word for it. For example, the English word lonely might not even have a German equivalent. This makes translation difficult because if these emotions are not translated right or not at all, then the reader isn't getting either the right message or the full message the author is trying to send.

Another thing that makes translation difficult is just about every other language besides English has masculine, feminine, and sometimes neutral forms for words. Meaning a bookshelf could be masculine, a book could be feminine, or a table could be neutral. There is no real way to explain why, its just how the culture, grammar, and literature developed. This can create a lot of lost meaning in translation, making it difficult to grasp the full meaning of a translated test. Mostly because the meaning is not there, it was lost in translation.