"Ayi" vs "Aunt"

This has been bothering me for years. Dictionaries and Chinese teachers should not be going around telling people that 阿姨 [ā yí] means "aunt" in English. It does sometimes- but usually not!

I have made this venn diagram which explains the meanings of "ayi" and "aunt" and the small overlap they have:

Venn diagram with one circle labelled "ayi" and one circle labelled "aunt." The "ayi" circle contains "friendly term of address for any woman you meet who is your parents' age" and "woman who works as a cleaner/ nanny/ domestic worker." The "aunt" circle contains "dad's sister" and "mom or dad's sister-in-law." The overlap area contains "mom's sister."

Hope this clears it up!

There were LOTS of things people told me early on, when I was learning Chinese, that *this* word translates to *this* other word, and I believed them, and then later found out that was not true, in ways which seemed very huge and important to me. I don't think it's their fault though- I think in many cases they didn't speak English at a deep enough level to understand that the English word they were using did not mean exactly what they thought it meant. (Oh man, don't get me started on the differences between 已经 and "already.") They had a lot of awareness of the important things to consider when one is coming from a totally-Chinese background and learning English, but going in the other direction has a whole different set of important considerations. (And there were times when I was listening to another native English speaker speaking Chinese, and their mistakes made perfect sense to me and I totally knew what they were trying to say, but our Chinese friends whose second language was English couldn't follow at all.)

Or, a dictionary might say some word is the translation of some other word, because if you *had* to choose 1 word, that's the one you would choose, but there actually aren't any English words that truly are the translation of that Chinese word- the way to translate it totally depends on the situation.

Translation is hard! But anyway, the important thing is, "ayi" usually does not mean "aunt."