someone gets lost in translation meaning

It is easy to translate from one language to another and make a mistake by using a word that seems correct but is wrong in the complete context.

A good example is when the idea “They are working hard” (meaning that they are doing a lot of work and are making great effort) is translated from another language into English as “They are hardly working” (meaning that they are doing very little work).

Once in the Alps with Austrian friends I stopped to make a heap of stones, a cairn. On meeting them soon afterwards, in German: “What were you doing, Anton?” “I was making a little heap.” They howled with laughter: in this context a little heap is a pile of faeces. My words were correct in a naive way but my meaning was lost in translation.

The words seem correct but the meaning has been completely lost. The original idea has been “lost in translation”.

When the meaning of something is said to be 'lost in translation' it is usually the case that the phrase which has been translated has an idiomatic meaning in the original language which it does not have in the target language. This means that when the phrase is translated it either has a different meaning in the target language or is completely meaningless.

An example of this is a line from the song Amoureuse written in French by Veronique Sanson who had a huge hit with it in the early seventies in France. The song was translated into English and recorded by Kiki Dee who also had a hit with the English version.

The original French includes the line "Je ressens la pluie d'une autre planète" which seems to have an idiomatic meaning in French but was translated into English as "I feel the rainfall of another planet" which is virtually meaningless in English even though it is a direct translation of the French. Perhaps the fact that 'pluie' means both 'rain' and 'tears' might have something to do with it.