The Complexities of Language: Which Languages Are Hardest to Translate?

You probably already have a sense of which languages are hardest to translate into English. And that sense is mostly right — but it might miss a few surprises.

The Usual Suspects

The languages that usually top the difficulty list are the ones that don’t share an alphabet, a grammar structure, or even a writing direction with English. And for good reason.

Mandarin Chinese has over 80,000 characters, and meaning is heavily dependent on tone — the same syllable spoken with a rising inflection means something entirely different from the same syllable spoken with a falling one. Homophones are everywhere, which means syntax is doing enormous work to disambiguate meaning. Strip out the context and things get weird fast.

Japanese adds another layer of complexity: it uses three distinct writing systems simultaneously. Kanji (Chinese-derived characters), Hiragana (a phonetic syllabary for native Japanese words), and Katakana (a second phonetic syllabary, primarily for foreign loanwords) coexist in a single sentence. Beyond the writing, Japanese has a deeply hierarchical structure — the level of formality baked into a sentence changes the vocabulary, verb endings, and even the pronouns used. None of that maps cleanly to English.

Korean is unrelated to other major language families, which makes it structurally alien to English speakers. Verbs go at the end of the sentence. Subjects are often omitted entirely. The honorific system rivals Japanese in complexity.

Arabic presents its own challenges: a non-Latin script read right-to-left, a root-based morphology where a single three-letter root can generate dozens of related words, and a significant gap between the formal written language and the spoken dialects actually used day-to-day.

Thai is a particular favorite for demonstrating how different a language can be. It doesn't use spaces between words — sentences are written as a continuous stream of characters, and the reader (or the parser) has to figure out where one word ends and the next begins. Verb conjugation works differently from European languages, and five distinct tones carry lexical meaning.

Put any of these through a machine translation chain and you're almost guaranteed something interesting on the other end.

The Surprising Challengers

What you might not expect is that some European languages — languages that share an alphabet and broad grammatical heritage with English — can also produce spectacular translation drift.

Finnish and Hungarian are both agglutinative languages: they build meaning by stacking suffixes onto root words, sometimes creating single words that would require a full clause in English. Finnish, famously, has fifteen grammatical cases. The language also has no grammatical gender and no articles, which forces a translator to make choices that English takes for granted.

Icelandic has been deliberately conservative — it tends to coin new words from old Norse roots rather than borrowing from other languages, keeping its vocabulary unusually pure and unusually opaque to outsiders.

German is famous for compound words: Verschlimmbessern (to make something worse while trying to improve it), Fernweh (a longing for distant places), Drachenfutter (literally "dragon fodder" — a gift brought home to appease a partner after bad behavior). English borrowed Kindergarten and Angst and Zeitgeist because there simply wasn't a better option. The rest stays stubbornly German.

These languages have strict grammatical rules, dense compound formations, and nuances that don't survive the translation journey intact — which makes them excellent middle stops in a language chain.

What This Means for the Mixer

All of this structural difference is exactly what makes Translation Mixer work. When you route text through a chain of languages with genuinely different grammars, writing systems, and ways of carving up the world, meaning doesn't just translate — it mutates.

Sometimes that mutation is funny. Take this excerpt from David Bowie's Space Oddity:

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Original:

This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

Path: English → Abkhaz → Hindi → Dutch → English

Result:

This is the ground check for Major Tom.
You have made a very good assessment.
The administration needs to know why you are wearing a shirt.
If you mean it, it is time to leave the capsule.

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"The administration needs to know why you are wearing a shirt." The mission control drama has been replaced by a vaguely bureaucratic dress code inquiry. That's Abkhaz doing its work.

But sometimes the mutation reveals something unexpected. Take Macbeth's most famous soliloquy, routed through ten languages including several of the hardest on this list:

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Original:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Path: Japanese → German → Korean → Hungarian → Finnish → Russian → Icelandic → Chinese (Traditional) → Arabic → Thai → English

Result:

Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow —
these small steps continue into eternity.
Our days will eventually end,
buried beneath the dust of fools. Go, go, flickering candle!
Life is merely a flickering shadow, like a pathetic actor
performing for an hour or two on stage.
A failed actor, gone forever. It's like a fairy tale
told by fools, full of noise and rage,
but utterly meaningless.

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That's not a failed translation. That's a different interpretation of the same despair — darker, more blunt, stripped of Shakespeare's verbal elegance but somehow no less true. "Full of sound and fury" becomes "full of noise and rage." "A poor player" becomes "a pathetic actor." "Signifying nothing" becomes "utterly meaningless."

The machine didn't understand Macbeth. But it found him anyway.

The Takeaway

The languages that drift the most — whether because of tonal complexity, agglutinative morphology, missing grammatical categories, or an entirely different alphabet — aren't just curiosities for linguists. They're the gears that make the telephone game interesting.

When you pick your translation path, consider adding at least one or two wildly different languages to your chain. Finnish and Japanese. Arabic and Hungarian. Thai and German. The more different the grammars your text has to pass through, the further it will travel — and the more surprising the destination.

What will your favorite quote, lyric, or line become on the other side?

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Want to go deeper? Read Why Machine Translation Humor Works, or explore A Brief History of Machine Translation. Or just try it yourself and see what comes out.