Loanwords and How They Change Language
Lost in Translation: The Loanwords That Weren't
April 22, 2026 · By Jeremy Lemley / Lemley Tech
English is a shameless borrower. Roughly a third of the English lexicon comes from French, another third from Latin and Greek, and the rest is a grab bag of Germanic roots, Norse raids, and centuries of colonial contact with languages across the globe. We took what we needed and rarely asked permission.
The result is a language littered with words that feel English but aren't: café, cliché, fiasco, blitzkrieg, smorgasbord, faux pas. We use them constantly. We've forgotten they're foreign.
Translation engines, it turns out, haven't forgotten. Or rather, they remember too well — and sometimes not at all.
I wanted to test how machine translation handles a sentence stuffed with loanwords. The sentence I constructed is, admittedly, a little ridiculous:
"In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas."
A note on the prefix: Google Translate's language detection occasionally gets confused by text heavy with French and German borrowings. Adding "In this sentence" at the start was enough to anchor it as English — which is itself a small illustration of the problem.
Run 1: Luganda → Thai → Somali → Russian → Makassar
Original: In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Final: In this context, scientists have repeatedly criticized prominent chefs' proposals to organize meals outdoors, which, due to numerous unprofessional mistakes, did not succeed.
See Full Path
English → In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Luganda → Mu sentensi eno, omumanyi yawa okunenya okw'ekika kya cliché ku avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, ekyali total fiasco olw'a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Thai → ในประโยคนี้ นักวิชาการได้วิจารณ์อย่างซ้ำซากจำเจต่ออาหารบุฟเฟ่ต์กลางแจ้งของเชฟแนวหน้า ซึ่งกลายเป็นความล้มเหลวโดยสิ้นเชิงเนื่องจากความผิดพลาดที่ไร้ฝีมือมากมาย
Somali → Jumladan, aqoonyahannadu waxay si isdaba joog ah u dhaleeceeyeen cuntada bannaanka ee ay bixiyaan cunto kariyaha hormuudka ah, taasoo noqotay mid gebi ahaanba fashilantay sababo la xiriira khaladaad badan oo aan xirfad lahayn.
Russian → В этом контексте ученые неоднократно критиковали предложения ведущих шеф-поваров по организации обедов на открытом воздухе, которые из-за многочисленных непрофессиональных ошибок потерпели полный провал.
Makassar → Ri anne konteks, ilmuwan a'mole-molemi angkritik proposal koki terkemuka untu' a'atoro' kanre ri pantarang, ia, lanri jaina kasalang tenaya na profesional, anre' na'kulle sukku'.
English → In this context, scientists have repeatedly criticized prominent chefs' proposals to organize meals outdoors, which, due to numerous unprofessional mistakes, did not succeed.
The collapse happens almost entirely in the first hop. Luganda keeps most of the loanwords intact — cliché, avant-garde, café, smorgasbord, fiasco, blitzkrieg, faux pas all survive as recognizable fragments, essentially left untranslated because Luganda has no native equivalents. But Thai has no such patience. Facing a string of European borrowings it can't resolve, it reaches for the nearest functional equivalent: the connoisseur becomes นักวิชาการ (an academic or scholar), the smorgasbord becomes a buffet, the blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas becomes simply "numerous unskilled mistakes." Everything colorful is replaced with something accurate but drab. By the time Russian gets it, it's already a straightforward account of a culinary criticism that didn't go well. The wit is gone. The vocabulary is gone. What remains is the skeleton of an event: some experts, some chefs, some outdoor meals, some failure.
"Scientists," though. That's a new character. The connoisseur took a long journey through five languages and came out a researcher.
Run 2: Rundi → Kyrgyz → Maori → Corsican → Occitan
Original: In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Final: In this sentence, the modern scholar firmly rejected the claims of the ancient cook that war was dangerous because of witchcraft.
See Full Path
English → In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Rundi → Muri iyo nteruro, uwo muhinga mu vy'ubuhinga bwa none yatanze inyishu y'agahomerabunwa ku bijanye n'ivyo umutetsi w'imbere y'igihe yari afise, ivyo bikaba vyari biteye akaga kubera intambara y'ubupfumu.
Kyrgyz → Ошол сүйлөмдө заманбап окумуштуу байыркы ашпозчунун сыйкырчылык согушунан улам кооптуу болгон дооматтарына кыйратуучу жооп берген.
Maori → I roto i taua rerenga kōrero, i tino whakahē te mataotao o ēnei rā i ngā kereme a te tunu kai onamata i mea ai ia he morearea te pakanga nā te makutu.
Corsican → In quella frase, u studiosu mudernu hà ricusatu fermamente l'affermazioni di u cuocu anticu chì a guerra era periculosa per via di a stregoneria.
Occitan → Dins aquela frasa, l'erudit modèrne refusèt fermament las afirmacions de l'ancian cosinièr que la guèrra èra perilhosa a causa de la bruèissaria.
English → In this sentence, the modern scholar firmly rejected the claims of the ancient cook that war was dangerous because of witchcraft.
This is a different kind of failure — and a more spectacular one. Where the first run produced something bland and forgettable, this one produced something that sounds like a historical drama.
The divergence starts in Rundi. Lacking equivalents for most of the loanwords, the translator does something creative: avant-garde becomes "modern" (reasonable), and blitzkrieg — a German word literally meaning "lightning war" — gets translated as intambara, which simply means "war." The metaphor collapses into the literal. By the time Kyrgyz gets it, the sentence is about a modern scholar responding to an ancient cook's claims about a dangerous war involving witchcraft, and the remaining languages — Maori, Corsican, Occitan — all faithfully carry that story forward.
Faux pas disappearing into witchcraft is the highlight. A French phrase meaning a social misstep, filtered through a language that has no frame for it, became something genuinely supernatural. It's the most extreme semantic drift in any of these runs, and it happened because blitzkrieg had a literal meaning that reasserted itself the moment the chain hit a language without the cultural context to treat it as a figure of speech.
Three More Quick Runs
The same sentence, routed through different language combinations, kept finding new ways to disintegrate.
English → Hebrew → Basque → Haitian Creole → Amharic → Dinka → English
Original: In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Final: In the episode, the expert reveals the absurdity of a chef's dinner at an outdoor kitchen, which fails miserably due to a premature conversation about what was expected to pass.
The faux pas — meaning something expected to pass social muster but failing — gets pulled apart by the Haitian Creole hop, with "pass" surviving as a literal concept. By Dinka, the blitzkrieg has become a "premature conversation." The event drifted from a culinary disaster to something more like an awkward dinner party scene.
English → Sepedi → Dzongkha → Kurdish (Kurmanji) → Albanian → Tetum → English
Original: In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Final: Experts have criticized the chef's variety of eating out, deeming him the victim of a careless error.
The most compressed result of the lot. Six languages reduced a baroque sentence to two clauses. The smorgasbord became "variety of eating out" — not wrong, exactly, just very flat. The entire blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas became "a careless error." Singular. The chain stripped everything down to the quietest possible version of the story: someone got criticized, someone made a mistake.
English → Shona → Sango → Bashkir → Finnish → English
Original: In this sentence, the connoisseur gave a cliché critique of the avant-garde chef's alfresco café smorgasbord, which was a total fiasco due to a blitzkrieg of maladroit faux pas.
Final: In this context, the scientist refers to the avant-garde chef's coffee delicacies, which are a great riot due to his mental insecurity.
Two things worth noting. First, café survived all the way to the end — but transformed. Rather than an outdoor café, it became "coffee delicacies," the food and drink detached from the setting. Second, fiasco — originally Italian theatrical slang for a failed performance — became "a great riot," which is nearly the opposite of failure. And maladroit faux pas became "mental insecurity," which is arguably a more psychologically sophisticated reading than the original intended.
The avant-garde survived intact through Shona, Sango, Bashkir, and Finnish, emerging unchanged in the final English output. Five languages, none of them European, and the French phrase came through untouched. Sometimes the chain preserves exactly the wrong thing.
What Loanwords Reveal
The sentence was designed as a stress test, and it failed in every direction at once — which is the point.
Loanwords are borrowed precisely because one language recognizes that another has captured something it hasn't. Schadenfreude. Zeitgeist. Déjà vu. Smorgasbord. These words crossed borders because they were useful, because there was no clean equivalent on the other side.
That same uniqueness is what makes them treacherous in translation. A translator encountering blitzkrieg in a culinary context has to decide: is this a metaphor or a literal reference to war? Most humans would read it as a metaphor without thinking. The machine has to guess — and when it guesses wrong, a buffet review becomes a historical account of wartime witchcraft.
The connoisseur became a scientist, then a scholar, then an expert, then a researcher. The smorgasbord became a buffet, then outdoor dining, then coffee delicacies. The faux pas became an error, then a conversation, then a supernatural event. Every language in every chain was doing its job correctly. The problem wasn't the translation. The problem was that the words themselves carried too much history for any single chain of machines to untangle.
Want to run your own loanword experiment? Head to Translation Mixer and try it. The more culturally loaded your vocabulary, the more surprising the result. Or read Why Machine Translation Humor Works for the theory behind why these failures are so entertaining.