Did you know that translating concepts of kinship isn’t always straightforward?
In English, we have the words brother, sister and sibling, so we can refer to our siblings by making reference to their gender (or not). However, if we want to indicate their relative age, then we need to use adjectives to do so (big sister, younger brother etc.). Not so in Hungarian, Turkish & Japanese (amongst others) which have separate words to specify whether a brother or sister is older or younger than oneself.
In English, if I talk about my sister-in-law or brother-in-law, then you would need to rely on context to determine whether I mean the spouse of my sibling or the sibling of my spouse. But these concepts have separate words in Serbian, Bosnian and Yiddish. Conversely, in French, as well as spouse’s brother and sibling’s husband, the term ‘beau frère’ can also mean step brother. When translating into a language with differently structured kinship terms, translators must be acutely aware of the necessity (or superfluity) of context.
