Those are all translations of virtus, albeit ones so cumbersome that they will probably mess up the scansion of your poetry line.
Perhaps untranslatable is ineffable in English.
Ah, yes, the humble portmanteau. I too came up with a new word the other day. Itâs a combination of the word âtestâ and the word article âarticleâ. I hope it catches on.
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Why is it so unsurprising that the author of this book is a self-described âwriter and illustrator,â and not a linguist or polyglot? Itâs almost like she took a list of words (and the English meanings) someone gave her and drew some pictures, like a intern at an internet publisher might doâŠ
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Translation of simple, universal concepts like hunger, baby, left, right, deep, shallow - theyâre all easy.
Some expressions cannot be translated, and they sit on a spectrum of complexity. Imagine translating the word âdemocracyâ to the Chinese in 1975.
Talking of chinese - itâs a highly contextual language, the nuances drawing on associations with strings of information, some of them thousands of years old, connecting stories and approaches to relationships between people that simply do not exist in the english speaking world.
English, like Russian, is highly metaphorical. Put them next to Chinese and translation appears only to function at the basic level.
Every language has friction with every other language; barriers that prevent perfect translation. We manage to produce transliteration at an adequate level to work with the basic concepts, but few bar genius multi-linguist writers can ever achieve the level of metaphorical connection to convey the sense in both languages.
For the record, Iâm bilingual, and converse in degrees varying from great to ok in four other languages.
If you canât see that some sentences are not capable of concise translation, Iâd be surprised.
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I think virtus is definitely untranslatable and none of those words will do.
An untranslatable word that jumps to mind is the french au which we usually translate as âwithâ but doesnât really just mean âwithâ and is just a preposition we donât really have. I bet prepositions are a rich field for untranslatability.
Another one Iâd say is ĆĆ«nyatÄ which Iâm familiar with in English as âemptiness.â I think these days it is fair to say that it is translatable since one of the meanings of the word âemptinessâ is now pretty much ĆĆ«nyatÄ. Thatâs a bit of an odd way of translating something, though - simply assigning a word to it and allowing that word to take up the additional meaning.
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Ok, we get it. âUntranslatableâ taken literally is a damned filthy lie and you will not take it anymore!
I wonder how you guys get any enjoyment at all out of wordplay, poetry etc. with such a strict zero tolerance policy on right-brained ambiguity/innacuracy.
I like humor, what I donât like is âtruthinessâ, like âlanguage X has an untranslatable word for perfectly clear concept Yâ or âlanguage X has no specific word for private property, or freedom, or lying and therefore people with this native language canât possibly understand these conceptsâ, etc.
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thereâs a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest?
Thatâs bit sanitised the original term is poronkusema (about 7km) direct translation would be something like reindeers piss break or something. Reindeer canât piss and run at thesame time and if they donât get piss breaks they can become paralysed.
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Sure. But clickbaity hyperbole aside, I find it kind of sad to entirely dismiss potentially interesting concepts like âsome languages includes surprisingly specific shorthand for such and such, making you think about cultural diferences and the way our words shape our thoughsâ (or whatever thoughts might be inspired by this) with a blanket âNo. Wrongâ.
Baby with bathwater and all that.
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Imagine translating the word âdemocracyâ to the Chinese in 1975.
âA construct used in the United States to placate their serf-classâ
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There needs to be a word for a person who canât find enjoyment in something if thereâs any detail thatâs at all technically incorrect about it.
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Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.
-Douglas Adams
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Good thing I donât deal in poetry. But actually itâs not that simple, because what I do deal in is history and trying to untangle exactly what was at play in ancient texts when they talk about moral figures, and I can assure you, all of those things at best are the equivalent of describing purple to someone whoâd never seen it as âkind of a blue-ish redâ . Itâs accurate, but treacherous. When Cicero talks about Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator or Cato Major as having virtus , I need to understand it as his audience would have- or at least, as best I can, and not by any of the english approximations- because they give the wrong idea. I remember once reading a reference to someone being at the âprecipice of gloryâ, which potentially contained the interesting idea of that height as implicitly dangerous, but when I tracked down the latin, while it was not an inaccurate translation, the latin language did not have that connotation.
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This is just silly. As said at the top, every single one of these is translatable.
Are we not all human? Do we not share the wealth of human experience? Does anyone really think that an Englishman, or a ÇKung hunter, has never experienced schadenfreude? Can you express the meaning in a few words? Then you can translate the concept, which is all translation is.
The idea that there needs to be a 1:1 word translation, or else itâs âuntranslatableâ is just absurd. By some counts, English has tens of thousands more words than any other language. Do we ever see lists of all the beautiful English concepts that donât exist in those other languages? On the other side of the coin, you can combine words together in German as much as you like, creating new âwords.â Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften means âinsurance companies providing legal protection.â Is that untranslatable?
You can no more find deep meaning in the fact that Japanese has a word for âsunlight filtering through the treesâ* than in the fact that German has âinsurance companies providing legal protection.â All languages have the same concepts, itâs just that some use one word and some use three. The old idea from the '60s that the specific words in our language shape our consciousness has been shown to be BS.
*And the English word for the way sunlight filters through the trees is âdappledâ sunlight
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But as much as the West liked to mock them, countries like China (and East Germany,etc) that named themselves âdemocratic republicsâ relied on their peopleâs understanding of what democracy was, which wasnât very different from the Western ideal â they had parliaments, elections, and in some cases like East Germany, actual multiple parties to choose from. Of course real dissidents were excluded from becoming candidates so there wasnât that much choice in practice, but thatâs really just a difference in degree rather than kind from Western democracies â where a common complaint is that there isnât enough difference between the views of mainstream parties.
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Actually, there are more than 50 different ways to say âlisticleâ in Inuinnaqtun. That nearly 50% of Nunavut now works for the Huffington Post or Buzzfeed surely has nothing to do with this, howeverâŠ
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Iâm sure Iâve mentioned this before on boing boing, but the Swedish word Lagom also does not have a corresponding word in English. Lagom means âjust the right amountâ or âjust enough is best.â
That word exists in Sweden because it reflects a culture of moderation and modesty. A culture where such things as modesty are held up and admired as something desirable, respected, and something to achieve and live up to.
That word doesnât exist in English because that idea doesnât exist here in the United States, land of bigger is always better.
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Well, I donât know. I mean, I enjoyed it, I was just disappointed that it wasnât about things that canât be accurately translated into English because there are plenty of them and theyâre interesting and I was looking forward to that. Theyâre like peeking into absolute blindspots, the ones weâre not aware of until we get sideswiped by some new and interesting idea. They impart interesting things about our culture, as well as the culture from which they originate. That kind of thing is like catnip to me.
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Has it? I donât mean that flippantly, but the idea seems alive and well to me, if perhaps in evolved form. There are certainly a lot of people who study culture through the lens of its language. Admittedly, thatâs a reversal of what youâre saying, in that itâs about the way language reflects culture and mentalities, rather than the way language shapes them, but itâs pretty close.
If youâve got something specific in mind arguing against it, I would be glad if you would point me in that direction!
Iâm not an absolutist about any of it, but I do find it jibes with my experience. For example, any time I see someone talking about women as âfemalesâ thereâs a better than even odds that the next bit is going to be woefully sexist. If youâre lucky. Word choice can be awfully revealing, especially in how often language and references are used to identify ourselves as part of the group, whichever group that is. But thereâs arguably another layer to it- like the females example, that usage is often not isolated from a sense of women as sub-human and monolithic. It keys up the idea of naturalist language. âthe female in her natural habitatâ kind of thing. It creates an artificial sense of distance from the thing being examined, and it definitely is accompanied with the sense of the object as âthingâ. Also implies the idea that women are something that must be studied to be understood, another type of distancing. As I said, itâs not absolute, but in context, it can be quite indicative.
A Brazilian friend of mine was having difficulty understanding what pizazz means, because every time he asks someone, the best they could do was jazz hands.
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