Is Forgiveness Something Tied to Western Philosophies/Religions and Therefore Is Not a Worldwide Idea?
I came across the above question, which suggests that forgiveness does not have a universal essence to it. Yet, some years ago, we at the International Forgiveness Institute did a study of forgiveness words in 26 different world cultures. As you will see below, forgiveness is not confined to Western thought.
Here is a list of various cultures and their words for “to forgive” or “I forgive you”:
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Albanian prt falur
Catalan a perdonar
Castilian Para perdonar
Czech Odpoutm
Danish At tilgive
Dutch Te vergeven
English to forgive
Filipino upang patawarin
Finnish Annettakoon se teille anteeksi
French pardonner
German Ich verzeihe Dir
Hungarian n megbocs tok neked
Icelandic afyrirgefa
Irish a logh
Italian A perdonare
Maltese li nahfru
Norwegian Til forlate
Polish Odpuszcza
Portuguese A perdoar
Romanian Pentru a ierta
Spanish Para perdonar
Swahili kusamehe
Swedish Frlta
Turkish BEN size bala
Vietnamese Ti tha th cho bn
Welsh i faddau
26 languages, 26 similar ways to communicate. This, of course, is no proof of the universality of “to forgive” or “I forgive you.” Yet, we put this term and this expression to the test and they were not defeated. At the very least we can conclude that forgiveness has a place in many cultures.
For each term or expression, we translated it from English into the other language. We then back-translated into English and retained the term/expression only if both forms of translation were consistent. The important implication is this: We can be motivated to talk with others about forgiveness and can be quite confident that the other person, from a different culture, has words that mean forgiveness, the same word that we are using.
