Several people have sent me this entry for the "No word for X" files — "When is it rape?", The Economist 11/15/2013:
In Urdu there is no word for rape. The closest direct translation is "looting my honour".
One of the correspondents adds:
Don't have any Urdu resources around, but one online dictionary turns up
زنا بالجب
Plug this into Google Translate and the relevant bits come back as as "repression" and "adultery", so I wonder if the standard Urdu for "rape" translates as something like "repressed into adultery". But your readers would surely know more.
I know less, so I'll turn this over to knowledgable readers for discussion. Is this one of the rare cases where "No word for X" makes a valid point about cultural differences?
I'll just note that running Google translate in the opposite direction gives some different alternatives:
In the recent Delhi gang-rape case, the convicted men were apparently speakers of Hindi, which is essentially the same language as Urdu. In last month's Mumbai gang-rape case, the men arrested for the crime may be speakers of Urdu. In neither case did I see any discussion of missing lexical items — is this something that the media overlooked?
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