Bof.
I’m sure many didn’t which i thought is the whole point of the article. You could always adopt that one i suppose.
*includes pronunciation
I think you’re being rather pedantic here. The author of the book is talking about individual words. Concision enters into the equation. The word “translatable” implies a certain ease of translation such that the meaning of the word or phrase in question can be expressed in a similar number of words in the target language. I would think that understanding the connotations as well as the denotations of words would be an important part of being a qualified translator, but evidently I am wrong…
The Swedish “tack” you refer to has an analogue that is both pronounced and used the similarly in Norwegian (at least I think it is – I only understand a tiny bit of Norwegian, but my Norwegian friends seem to use it the same way).
Dutch and Flemish have a similar word, alstublieft (or alsjeblieft, if you’re feeling less formal) that literally means “if you please” and is used to mean “please,” but also serves as a “utility” word like you describe. In practice, it can mean anything from “please” to “here you go” to “can I help you” to “I’ve just done something for you and I am audibly acknowledging it.” It never means “thank you,” though…
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Pining for the fjords?
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That seems like an overgeneralization to me. Flemish, for example, has an enormous number of individual, non-compound words – most of them just a couple of syllables – that describe specific weather conditions (mostly various forms of rain).
I think this is what is usually meant by “untranslateable”. You can claim that “poronkusema” translates to “about 7km” but then you won’t understand a joke, conversation or poem that relies on knowing about the relationship between this word and a reindeer’s bodily functions.
“I walked home from the bar, it was about ten poronkusema, I swear”
“What? Your house isn’t that far from the bar!”
“Well, I have a very small bladder”.
I have a very good translation of Sun Tzu that provides multiple different translations for specific combinations of chinese characters. It’s surprisingly more informative than any of my more traditional translations, which rely on interpreters choosing which meaning was intended by the original author. In most cases the author was purposely using words with multiple meanings, because the sentence carries multiple meanings.
In English, the word “light” has many translations. It means a condition of low weight, an electric lamp, a property of illumination, the act of igniting a flame, a condition of pale color, and so forth. It seems to me that a poet or skilled storyteller rarely uses only one meaning at a time.
@MattSE1: If you spoke only Basque, and I drew a picture of a person floating and said “light: translates to the opposite of heavy” in the Basque tongue, would you say “obviously that is totally translatable - you just did it!”? I think the point I’m (poorly) making is that if these words really are untranslatable, it’s because there are connotations that these translations lack (or add).
Somebody here translated luftmensch as “dreamer” or “space cadet”… but those are actually two different things. Which is it? Or is it “airhead”? Or maybe there is a cultural connotation to luftmensch that isn’t being translated by any of these?
Красная площадь is always translated as “Red Square” but that’s not what it means at all. Because, fundamentally, “red” doesn’t mean the same thing in English as it does in Russian.
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Were any of the “10 Untranslatable Words That You Won’t Believe Can Lower Your Mortgage” Flemish?
Kind of how we express the volume of large objects as ‘(n) double-decker buses’ then?
What you did there…
This discussion reminds me of Douglas Adams’ The Meaning of Liff, a dictionary of words for things that don’t have words to describe them, but ought to.
I’m pretty sure there are untranslatable concepts, but these largely span time… there are things that we experience that your average Roman (or, say, Shakespeare) wouldn’t be able to even begin to conceive of.
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If you can provide any sort of proof of either of those statements, I will be deeply grateful.
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Would this be the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis
Beats me! If you try to reference Sapir-Whorf, though, you’ll generally have to speak to a specific formulation based on particular research… Whorf’s research has been shown to have flaws, for example, but there’s been a lot of research done more recently that still claims to prove that language both reflects our physical capabilities and shapes our perceptions. I am not aware of any categorical invalidation of all these claims.
Or, as a bad automobile analogy: You can’t buy a brand new Edsel off the line in Detroit, but that doesn’t mean the Edsel was not significant, and there are modern Fords you can buy that will take you the same places. 
Sapir-Whorf’s an Edsel.
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Exactly! Well…i initially misunderstood that and thought you were referring to slartibartfast’s fjords which would kind of fit actually.
What about “dappled” light?
And how about some reverse translations for “contrafribularites”. It is a common word down our way.
In some German dialects, “contrafibularities” is neatly described by the word “Schwarzekreutzotterunsinn”. Human experience is truly universal.
I guess it depends on your definition of “translate”. You can describe the meaning but often it’s nearly impossible to make a sentence that truly conveys the same feeling.
Going into a old toy shop, seeing a toy from your childhood, a Japanese person might say very loudly “Natsukashiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!” How do you say that in English? You can say “Wow, this toy really brings back memories” and that’s the literal translation but that sentence in English is not the same kind of expression. There is no English equivalent of the exclamation “Natsukashii!”.
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But by that logic nothing is translatable. “Aoi” means “blue” in Japanese. But it also can mean “green” and “pale,” and there is no direct English equivalent for the range of meaning that “aoi” encompasses. Even words with the same source diverge. “Pan” in Japanese may have come from the Portuguese word for bread, but over time what the Japanese consider bread has diverged from what the Portuguese consider bread.
Picking ten random words out of a dictionary could produce one of these “untranslatable” lists if we redefine untranslatable in this way. That’s not to say that they’re not interesting, but they’re not untranslatable.
i think you missed my point or else you gave bad examples. “Aoi” is easy to translate. If the person really means “blueish green” then it’s a perfectly fine translation. Similarly if by “Pan” he means “■■■■■ white slightly sweet bread” then just say that. It fits the exact same place in a sentence and is grammatically the same.
“natsukashiiiiiiiii!” on the other hand is an exclamation. There is no equivalent exclamation in English. For example “Oishiiii!” can be translated as “Yum!!!” It fits perfectly. Both are exclamations. But “natsukashiiiii!!” and “Wow, this toy really brings back memories” are not equivalent. One is an exclamation, the other is a statement.
