Translation and the Untranslatable

Every translation is an argument about what a text means. The translator must interpret before they render, and the choices made in interpretation determine the character of the resulting text. Two translations of the same work are two readings of it, which is why significantly different translations of canonical texts coexist without cancelling each other out. Each reveals different things.

This is also why the concept of the "untranslatable" is both real and slightly misleading. Words and phrases deemed untranslatable — the German Schadenfreude, the Portuguese saudade, the Welsh hiraeth — can be described in other languages at some length. What cannot be translated, or can only be translated with difficulty, is the precision and economy of the original. The concept is available; the capsule is not.

More interesting are the grammatical and structural features of languages that resist translation because they encode distinctions that the target language does not make. Russian has two verbs for "go" depending on whether the going is on foot or by vehicle; Finnish has fifteen grammatical cases; some languages have grammatical marking for evidentiality — for whether the speaker witnessed what they are describing or heard it from someone else. These features are not decorative. They encode information that speakers of languages without them must convey by other means, if they convey it at all.

The philosopher Barbara Cassin has edited a philosophical lexicon of untranslatables that uses the concept not to argue for linguistic mysticism but to demonstrate that conceptual history is also linguistic history — that the meanings of key philosophical terms carry the residue of the specific debates that produced them. To translate is always to decide what matters in this residue and what can be left behind. These are never trivial decisions.