How to say toothache in Catalan

When i want to write a quick email or a Facebook status update in Catalan and i want to check whether the expression that i want to write is correct and i don’t find it in a dictionary – or am too lazy to look for it – i google it.

I searched for “mal de dents”, hoping that it would be “toothache”, much like “mal de cap” is “headache” and “mal de panxa” is “stomachache”. And i found that it is, indeed, toothache – but in French! Even adding “amb” to the search didn’t help. Adding “amb” is a trick that i learned from the Esperantists, who often add “kaj” to every search.

I did find it on a few Catalan sites, but still wasn’t completely sure, so i overcame the laziness and checked a dictionary. UB English-Catalan dictionary suggests “mal de queixal”. “Queixal” is “molar” and it actually makes sense: I don’t remember that i ever had any incisor or molar ache.

Recorda la llet

Remember The Milk is a very nice service, which i started using today. It is available in many languages—English, Russian, Japanese, Latvian. Not in Hebrew, but that’s probably understandable—Hebrew has right-to-left issues in addition to the translation itself. It is available in Bosnian, but not in Serbian or Croatian, which is weird, but whatever.

But the weirdest thing is that it has no Catalan translation. Usually Catalan is one of the first languages to which websites and program that accept translations are translated.

Estrany.