AustLit

'That there is no easy translation for 'awkward' in other languages suggests that I'm only myself in English. This feels like a loss because I'd like to think of myself as Turkish, too. An internet search on this subject - is awkwardness an Anglophone phenomenon - will throw up near-miss translations, foreign words that instead capture strangeness, discomfort, ugliness, untidiness, clumsiness. Some languages have resorted to borrowing the word from English wholesale - Spanish and German use 'awkward' the way they use 'download' or 'spinning'. In Turkish we say tuhaf or sakar. One means strange, the other clumsy.'

 (Publication abstract)