I have been translating Yoruba folk tales into English for fourteen years. The most frequent question I get from readers is some version of “why don’t you just translate it the way it is in Yoruba?” The most frequent answer I give is some version of “because English does not have the words.”

This is not abstract. There are at least five specific Yoruba words that recur constantly in folk tales and that have no clean English equivalent. The closest translations are misleading. The accurate translations are paragraphs.

1. ìjapá

Standard translation: tortoise. Functional meaning: yes, the animal, but specifically the trickster-tortoise figure who recurs across the Yoruba folk tradition as a complicated, often selfish, often clever, sometimes wise figure. When a Yoruba child hears ìjapá, the child does not picture a tortoise. The child pictures a specific character with whom they have a forty-tale-long relationship.

The English “tortoise” is just an animal. The whole literary inheritance is lost in the substitution. I have started, in recent translations, leaving ìjapá untranslated and explaining once in a footnote. This is unconventional and some editors push back. I think the editors are wrong.

2. ìwà

Standard translations: character, behavior, conduct, nature. None of these is right. Ìwà is closer to “the quality of soul as expressed through action” — what a person’s existence is making of itself, moment by moment. It is a verb-noun. In Yoruba folk tales, characters are praised or condemned for their ìwà, and this is not the same as their actions or their nature. It is the shape their being is taking.

I cannot translate this. I usually paraphrase, and I lose the texture.

3. àlọ́

Standard translation: folktale. This is technically correct and completely insufficient. Àlọ́ is specifically a participatory folk tale — one that requires the audience to call out responses, refrains, and the closing formula. It is not a tale you read alone. It is a tale you do together. To call an àlọ́ a “folktale” is to translate it into the form of a thing that can be read silently, which is not the form it has.

When my children were small I would tell them àlọ́ the way my own mother told them — with the call-and-response pattern intact. They picked it up immediately. Reading them an English “folktale” is not the same activity.

4. ọmọlúwàbí

Standard translations: a person of good character, a well-brought-up child, a moral person. Closer than the others, but the Yoruba word carries a specific aesthetic of dignified self-restraint, intergenerational respect, and quiet honesty that is not captured by the English. An ọmọlúwàbí is recognizable by their ìwà; the two concepts are linked.

Most Yoruba folk tales end by either praising the protagonist as an ọmọlúwàbí or condemning them as failing to be one. The English translation of this final move usually goes: “and so X was praised for being a good child” — which is approximately the right shape but ten times less specific.

5. àánú

Standard translation: pity, mercy, compassion. None is quite right. Àánú is closer to “the sudden upwelling of feeling for another being’s situation that obliges you to act.” It is involuntary in the same way that a yawn is involuntary. It is also the foundation virtue of Yoruba ethics — the thing that, in folk tales, separates the saved from the damned.

The English “pity” carries a faint condescension that àánú does not. The English “mercy” carries a power asymmetry that àánú does not. The English “compassion” is the closest but is still too cool, too rational.

What this means for children’s bedtime stories

The cost of these losses is small, individually, and large, cumulatively. A Yoruba child raised on properly translated tales hears the same five concepts every night across hundreds of stories, and grows up with a moral vocabulary tuned to that tradition. A child reading those same tales in standard English translation gets the plots but not the moral architecture.

We do not have a clean solution. What we have is the honest practice: leave the untranslatable words untranslated, footnote them, trust the child. The child who hears ìjapá used consistently across forty tales will figure out what it means. The child who hears “tortoise” will not, because tortoise is just an animal in English, and they will be reading a different tale than the tale was.

— Nadia Okonkwo is a translator and editor at Bedtimestory.world. Her most recent translation, Tales for the Quiet Hour: West African Bedtime Stories, is in preparation with Cassava Republic Press.