Mandarin Chinese : 脱了裤子放屁
— Ciaran Fitzpatrick (@CCFitzpatrick95) July 19, 2019
English Translation: To do things the hard way.
Literal Translation: “Remove one’s trousers in order to fart”
Twitter user @jazz_inmypants has only recently discovered the phrase "not my circus, not my monkey,” but in Polish. His Tweet about it drew people from all over to contribute idioms in various languages that you may want to adopt yourself. There are some 2,600 responses so far.
There are more in the discussion at Metafilter. From jklaiho:
A couple of Finnish ones I didn’t see there:
”Ei ole kaikki Muumit laaksossa”
Approximately: to not be all there
Literally: to not have all of their Moomins in the valley
”Aina ei mene nallekarkit tasan”
Approx.: life’s not fair
Lit.: the gummi bears are not always divided evenly
And there's this one from Mefite alchemist that paints a picture:
“Der er ingen ko på isen"
Language: Danish
Literal: “there is no cow on the ice”
English Equivalent: “we have no problem/everything is OK”
Another favourite: "Cocodrilo que se durmió, es cartera"
— Joe Shed (@redactednerd) July 21, 2019
Language: Spanish
English equivalent: It's a jungle out there
Literally: "The Crocodile that fell asleep is now a purse"
You can browse all the responses at Twitter. -via Metafilter