There are many single word concepts in one language that often require multiple phrases to explain the same in others.
Zeitgeist is one of these as in "spirit of the times".
Along with these words also come different customs.
In South Africa one of the least understood was the custom of indigenous cultures to look down and not respond whilst being admonished by say an employer.
The act of looking down and not responding is an act of politeness often interpreted as 'insolence'!
Yet good manners in indigenous customs however require that you listen without interrupting!
In South Africa we have this indigenous spirit of Ubuntu which roughly translates into "I am a person because you are a person ...".
"I've always loved the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which proposes that the structures and vocabulary that make up a language reflect the mentality and thought processes of the people who speak that language. So, according to the hypothesis, the fact that the word "esperar" in Spanish serves for the concepts of "wait", "hope" and "expect" would infer something about the Spanish mentality, would imply that those three concepts (which are very different in the mind of an English speaker) are somehow much more similar in the mind of a Spanish speaker. "
To understand each other we should keep Sapir-Whorf in mind.
