Non universality of "I love you"
Hi all!
I'm looking for good examples of problems occuring when translating the standard English declaration d'amour "I love you".
According to this page, most discrepancies concern the difference between male and femal speaker or addressee (Khmer, Punjabi, Hindi, Chechen, Arabic, Amharic..), or the opposition formal / informal (whatever it mean in such languages as Macedonian, Persian, Sinhala, Uzbek). I don't know the difference between mentionning the pronoun or not in Serbian (я те волим / волим те), between Slovenian predicates ljubim and imam rad(a) - Ljubim te - Rad(a) te imam -, and infortunately Tagalog mahal kita / ini-ibig kita is... Greek to me!
I have also been said that Chinese 我爱你 (wo ai ni) sounds brutal and harsh in Mainland China (as if it were some translation from English), but that was about 20 years ago, things may have changed since then...
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I'm looking for good examples of problems occuring when translating the standard English declaration d'amour "I love you".
According to this page, most discrepancies concern the difference between male and femal speaker or addressee (Khmer, Punjabi, Hindi, Chechen, Arabic, Amharic..), or the opposition formal / informal (whatever it mean in such languages as Macedonian, Persian, Sinhala, Uzbek). I don't know the difference between mentionning the pronoun or not in Serbian (я те волим / волим те), between Slovenian predicates ljubim and imam rad(a) - Ljubim te - Rad(a) te imam -, and infortunately Tagalog mahal kita / ini-ibig kita is... Greek to me!
I have also been said that Chinese 我爱你 (wo ai ni) sounds brutal and harsh in Mainland China (as if it were some translation from English), but that was about 20 years ago, things may have changed since then...
Any help would be greatly appreciated!