Whenever I think that my inner linguist is half asleep, she’s always wide awake.
In the middle of a busy day, a colleague of a former colleague asked: what is an English equivalent of a German expression offene Türen einrennen (literally, “to run into open doors”).
My inner linguist immediately leapt to help with a version in French, enfoncer des portes ouvertes, in Russian, ломиться в открытые двери, and in Italian, sfondare una porta aperta.
For English, however, she had to consult a dictionary, to find out that indeed, there is an expression to push at an open door (or to push against an open door).
Other English expressions with close meanings are to state the obvious, to preach to the choir, and to preach to the converted.
I like to think about meanings of similar expressions in different languages as Venn diagrams.
Sometimes, the overlap is almost complete, perhaps, due to a shared origin or source.
For example, the expression open sesame in English, if we continue with the door theme, has close parallels: Sésame, ouvre-toi in French, Сим-сим, откройся! in Russian, apriti sesamo! in Italian, Sesam, öffne dich! in German, etc. They all come from the magical command used by Ali Baba to open the door of the robbers’ den in “One Thousand and One Nights”, rather, in its translations into different languages.
Often, the overlap is partial, like in the case of the French expression “enfoncer des portes ouvertes”, which can be rendered in English also as to flog a dead horse and even to teach your grandmother to suck eggs — depending on the context.
Sometimes, there is no overlap, and in order to render the meaning correctly, I need to have more than one string to my bow.
I am fascinated by comparative phraseology and tend to repeat that all languages can convey any meaning, but they do it with different means.
19 languages 