Beyond Translation

“Linguistic relativity” is the idea that people think differently in different languages or cultures.

Some untranslatable terms are merely quirky reflections of a culture, but others point to more profound differences in thought. I was interested in exploring this concept, and as a side project decided to create a wiki to gather all of them in one place.

I interviewed native speakers to help write the initial content, and illustrated some of the terms with friends. People can also submit and edit the terms. There’s currently 120+ words in there and growing.

Built in React, Tailwind and ThreeJS.