I've studied translation and what was fascinating to me was all the terminology that a language uses that's totally linked to the culture in which it's used.
For example, in Brazilian Portuguese, someone may say something like "show de bola" (literal translation: "ball show" using the borrow English word "show" for something like "great performance") even in seemingly completely unrelated context, like when you do well on your math homework :D. Because football parlance is ingrained so deep into the collective mind of the population that you can "transfer" what would normally describe a fantastic play by a football team to pretty much any other context you like.
I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?
That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.
>I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right
It's true, there are a bunch of American idioms related to baseball. What's funny about this, however, is that baseball isn't very popular in America these days (American football and basketball are much more popular, and I think even hockey is now more popular), but baseball is actually quite popular in Japan.
In British English you can be "knocked for six", meaning you're stunned or shocked. It originates from cricket, where you score six points by knocking the ball out of the park.
I know Americans have a similar relationship with baseball-specific words, right (not a native speaker so I won't try to give examples)?
That's one of the biggest difficulties when trying to translate... how would you translate that to English? You may need to use a similarly local "slang", which requires you to know where the target audience is from exactly (USA - East / West coast?? -, UK - London, Manchester? -, Australia??) to do it justice... and even the ideal translation may need to even consider recent (and not so recent) events and local customs/sensitivities (an obvious example is words to describe races in the USA) and pop references.