Ahahaha, Chinese was the opposite. I found a page of someone's collections of Chinese proverbs, and four characters -- just four characters! -- would have like five or six different English translations. All sort of the same, but off by just a hair.
Though with Spanish proverbs, I've found the same -- there's one that, IIRC, is literally "no mind, no heart", ack, something like that, I can't recall now. But it's the one that's sometimes translated as "out of sight, out of mind," but then I've come across it being translated elsewhere as something more like "distance makes the heart grow fonder" which I would've thought was the exact opposite. That kind of, "is this supposed to be sarcasm?"
But then, those nuances are what makes learning a different language feel like an impossible task, sometimes. Like you could know the entire dictionary and still not really get the meaning.
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Date: 19 Feb 2011 04:57 am (UTC)Though with Spanish proverbs, I've found the same -- there's one that, IIRC, is literally "no mind, no heart", ack, something like that, I can't recall now. But it's the one that's sometimes translated as "out of sight, out of mind," but then I've come across it being translated elsewhere as something more like "distance makes the heart grow fonder" which I would've thought was the exact opposite. That kind of, "is this supposed to be sarcasm?"
But then, those nuances are what makes learning a different language feel like an impossible task, sometimes. Like you could know the entire dictionary and still not really get the meaning.