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by LargeTomato 894 days ago
In Arabic there is no word for "uncle". There is only "dad's brother" and "mom's brother". Often times an English speaker will leave out the paternal/maternal portion and the Arabic sentence may be ambiguous. If the English speaker later specified the needed information and the Arabic translator guessed wrong then there's a confusing problem here and the Arabic listener might get confused.
1 comments

Is there no structure to express a parent's (or father's or mother's) brother? It may not flow well but avoids making incorrect assumptions.
In my language, there are two different words for Maternal uncle and Paternal uncle, so translating from English without any context might completely change the relationship.