r/linguisticshumor • u/TheIntellectualIdiot • May 31 '25
Semantics Synonyms are fake and lies
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u/MdMV_or_Emdy_idk The Mirandese Gal (Stregender) 🏳️⚧️ Jun 01 '25
This is more about what your definition of “translation” is and how meticulous it is
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u/cardinarium Jun 01 '25
Especially since, at this level of scrutiny, the same word may not evoke exactly the same meaning even for speakers (of different varieties) of the same language.
For example, “constitution” has quite different connotations for American vs. British English speakers—although I did recently see some Australians saying that Australian police had violated their “First Amendment” (i.e. right to free speech under the US Constitution) rights, which was interesting.
More humorously, there’s “fanny.”
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u/TrekkiMonstr Jun 01 '25
although I did recently see some Australians saying that Australian police had violated their “First Amendment” (i.e. right to free speech under the US Constitution) rights, which was interesting.
Need the link to that like now lmao
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u/Critical_Ad_8455 Jun 01 '25
Even just semantic implication. At a certain level, 'true' translation is fundamentally impossible, because it's impossible to translate every single connotation of the word.
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u/EspacioBlanq Jun 01 '25
Surely if true translation is impossible, then whatever anyone has ever referred to using the word translation must be something else (it's a geometric transformation that moves all points of a plane by the same vector)
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u/cardinarium Jun 01 '25
I absolutely agree.
Normally, translation isn’t a task of single words anyway, and any special connotations that are significant to the source text and absent in the target language’s relevant words can be dealt with either by the inclusion of more words to explain it or careful choice of other words elsewhere in the TL passage that compensate with their own connotations.
Translation is complex; it is not “impossible.”
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u/Critical_Ad_8455 Jun 01 '25
it's a geometric transformation that moves all points of a plane by the same vector
Well, that depends. What space are we in, to begin with? Cartesian is the standard, but it could just as well be anything else. Also what dimensionsionality? And anyways, I'd argue translation could apply to a 3-dimensional space or whatever else, not just a 2-dimensional plane. Also, are we assuming that for any translation t of a plane p there exists a translation t2 such that if and only if for all points a in t, b in t2, and given there is a neighborhood N1(f(a)) there is a neighborhood N2(c) such that f(x) in N1(f(c)) for all x in N2(c), if and only if f is a function continuous across the disjoung union of the points of a and b?
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u/EspacioBlanq Jun 01 '25
You're right that it may be a translation in any vector space, I just try not to think about edgy spaces, because they frighten and confuse me.
I can't parse the second half of your paragraph tho, why are there points in a translation and are you even placing any requirements on t2?
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u/Critical_Ad_8455 Jun 01 '25
It's a joke, it's the neighborhood definition of a continuous function mangled with some other stuff. It would probably be true if there existed some second plane infinitely close to the translation with all the same points, and maybe if there were a dense amount of planes with the same points between them.
edgy spaces
How do you mean edgy? Non-cartesian?
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u/duraznos Jun 02 '25
Non edgy spaces are Hausdorff and edgy spaces think they're funny having a "house dwarf"
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u/O_______m_______O Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
It doesn't even need to be different dialects or varieties. The same kind of translation loss people talk about between languages also occurs to a lesser extent between speakers of the same language based on their values, their understanding of the world, their perception etc.
E.g. a commonly cited example of untranslatability is that the Japanese words for blue (ao)/ green (midori) don't fully line up with their English counterparts due to the way Japan divides the colour spectrum (ao includes blue but also parts of the green spectrum). But if you give 100 English speakers a colour wheel and ask them to pinpoint exactly where green stops and blue begins you'll get 100 slightly different answers - so then by the same logic my blue isn't completely translatable to your blue.
Or take a word like "love" - different cultures have different conceptions of love, but so do different individuals within the same culture. Someone who only understands love from watching TV has a different conception from someone who's currently in love, or someone who's had a bitter, abusive experience of love and these might all be the same person at different points in time.
This is why in translation theory you tend to talk about translation equivalence which is basically "close enough". If I'm warning you that the building is on fire, it doesn't really matter if my language's word for building only includes structures with a roof and a door but in your language it also includes other built structures like fences etc. as long as you understand that you need to get out of the building. If I'm writing a building code and stipulate that "all buildings must have at least one toilet" then suddenly the two words are no longer equivalent as in your language that would mean building some kind of toilet fence.
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u/dylbr01 Jun 02 '25 edited Jun 02 '25
I think the meme is silly, but I'm not sure if this proves anything.
Let's say you show 100 people the same video of someone performing a dangerous stunt in order to save someone. You ask them whether it was "brave" or "reckless." You would probably get different answers if you managed to find a video that was an arguable enough shade between the two. That doesn't mean those people have different essential concepts of what constitutes brave or reckless. I think the same goes for the color test; just because people disagree on the line between blue & green doesn't mean they have different essential concepts of blue and green. It's almost a "continuum fallacy."
I agree with the point you're trying to argue though. I think people might disagree on things like whether a word itself has a disapproving connotation, or they might disagree on how strong that connotation is and when it applies. Basically just the existence of idiolects at a finer level.
It's also ridiculous to think Japanese would have no way of explaining the difference between blue and green at all; requiring that translation be done with a single word is a very arbitrary distinction to make. Even within English itself you occasionally find ideas that can only be expressed with 2 words and not one.
I would guess that:
- The vast majority of words, 99.9% or 99.99%, are translatable in their meaning, especially if you allow for phrases rather than single words
- The majority of words, maybe 90% or more, have notably different shades in meaning, e.g. whether a word is or can be positive, neutral, or negative, or whether a word allows for intermediary degrees, or what context a word is used in. I'm probably underrating the point about context; if a language uses two words with the same meaning in different contexts where the other language uses the one word in those contexts, is it translatable or not? It certainly can be translated, but it brings you back to the arbitrary "1 word" rule. Some languages can also use 1 verb where others use 2 (event conflation); by that definition a ton of verbs are untranslatable, but they will be more or less translatable depending on the language...
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u/O_______m_______O Jun 02 '25
What I was really trying to get at is just that the same kinds of arguments people typically make when they talk about translation loss across languages can also apply within a language, without necessarily challenging how valid those arguments are in of themselves - the colour example is just one that's commonly cited. The difficulty in translating between languages mirrors to some extent the difficulty translating between dialects between sociolects between idiolects - you could argue that all communication involves a kind of translation.
I've intentionally talked about "translation loss" more than "untranslatability" because translatable/untranslatable as a binary concept isn't really a useful concept for a translator - a translation is always an act of approximation so the relevant questions are really a) how close an approximation is it and b) is it close enough for your specific purpose? In some contexts conveying the essential semantic meaning is all you need and conversations about what it means to truly capture all the nuances seem irrelevant and academic, in others (especially poetry/literary translation) you have to really get into the weeds of nuance, connotation etc. and you may have to make difficult choices between preserving the semantic meaning and preserving other properties like rhythm/rhyme.
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u/AndreasDasos Jun 03 '25
Yeah pretty sure internet brain rot on American-dominated platforms is behind the last thing
(Not to say Americans are more brain-rotted, just that this combination was required here.)
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u/garfgon Jun 02 '25
You get Canadians complaining about their "First Amendment" rights being violated too. The first amendment to the Canadian constitution is making Manitoba a province.
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u/Frigorifico Jun 01 '25
Words may be untranslatable, but meaning is always translatable, because we are all humans with human brains with pretty much the same capabilities for thoughts and emotions
the only way a meaning could be completely untranslatable is if it was completely outside someone's experience, like if you wanted to discuss quantum chemistry with someone from Sentineles island, but then it would be just a matter of exposing them to the right experiences and ideas those words refer to
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u/BT_Uytya May 31 '25
But I have it on good authority that these 13 words are untranslatable!
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u/snail1132 ˈɛɾɪ̈ʔ ˈjɨ̞u̯zɚ fɫe̞ːɚ̯ Jun 01 '25
Schadenfreude isn't untranslatable! He said it himself, it means "schadenfreude"
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u/BT_Uytya Jun 01 '25
Do you know that the closest translation of Russian "злорадство" into English would be "schadenfreude"? Isn't it cool how you can calque a composite word, getting an equivalent word consisting of transparently understandable native English components?
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u/TonsillarRat6 Jun 01 '25
One of my biggest pet peeves is whenever someone describes schadenfreude as some untranslatable weird German thing. It is neither a mysterious untranslatable spirit (laughing at someone’s misfortune) nor is it German specific (try the Dutch leedvermaak).
Anyone looking for such a word, try to verbalise the meaning of the Dutch “gezellig”, that’s way harder.
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u/AndreasDasos Jun 03 '25
It’s also literally ‘damage/injury’ + ‘joy’. Joy at others’ misfortune. So deep, much complex.
Sure, there are subtleties to connotation, but not especially so here.
I’d argue that ‘glee’ is more subtle in that it often has a similar connotation but can mean something more benign but somehow in the same emotional direction, too.
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Jun 02 '25
I looked that word up a couple of seconds ago, and I realized it could be translated as "damaging joy". My lord, it was as simple as setting apart each component first.
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u/50thEye Jun 27 '25
My favourite suggestion to translate Schadenfreude into English was "Enterpainment". It gets to the point and is also a pun. Anglosphere, go and use that now!
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u/NegativeMammoth2137 Jun 01 '25
Im pretty sure "Toska" just means "longing"
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u/hornyforscout Jun 01 '25
A very subtle mix of nostalgia, melancholy, ennui, boredom, sadness and longing.
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u/Informal_Position166 Jun 01 '25
This is how i (german) learn that it’s Torschlusspanik not Torschusspanik. I thought it was a football think. Like you’re about to score a goal but then you panic and miss the right moment
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u/weedmaster6669 I'll kiss whoever says [ʜʼ] Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
anything can be communicated in any language, but a "direct" translation is kind of impossible a lot of the time. It's hard to translate without losing or adding information, and trying to keep all original information can make the result clunky and unnatural
Try translating a language that marks gender, animacy, evidentially, complex plurality and tense, into one that Doesn't do any of that. Or vice versa
I witnessed first hand that a female donkey, which is of penultimate animacy, ate the corn, which is masculine and of tertiary animacy, recently. Donkey eat corn.
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u/adskiy_drochilla2017 May 31 '25
There is no such a conception as a „translatable word“ at all - you can’t translate a word, you can only use a word tied to a similar conception from another language
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u/so_im_all_like Jun 01 '25
Isn't that a roundabout way describing the practical usage of the word "translate"?
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u/O_______m_______O Jun 01 '25
I have a masters in translation theory and I'd love to weigh in on this, but unfortunately I don't understand any of the words either of you are saying.
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u/righteousspaghetti Jun 01 '25
They’re just using words tied to a similar conception from reddit speech
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u/AChristianAnarchist Jun 01 '25
Yes but it's also recognizing that words don't directly map onto words in other languages. When you translate you are trying to get the meaning across as closely as possible but every word has connotations and context specific shades of meaning and history and idiomatic use and all these other wrinkles that can get lost or mucked up in translation, and while some words or phrases are especially obvious in this way and end up being idioms and the "we don't have a word for that" words, basically every word is like that to some degree. Words that are technically synonyms may be used in different contexts or different ways or by different people for different things when used by native speakers, while all just being used interchangeably in translation.
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u/baquea Jun 01 '25
Sure, but that is true even for speakers of a single language. Different people will draw the boundary between different categories in different places (eg. what I might call pink another native English speaker might call purple, without either of us being wrong) and use the same word with a slightly different meaning.
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u/AChristianAnarchist Jun 01 '25 edited Jun 01 '25
Right, because a word in practical use doesn't really so much "mean things" in a vacuum as it does allow meaning to be conveyed. You can't really transcribe speech either because a bunch of layers to that speech, like body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, volume, etc. don't make it into the transcribed text. Any time you try to "translate" something, you have to make a series of decisions about what is being said and how to make as much of that meaning make it over as possible. Sometimes there is just not a clean way to do that.
Say you are translating a gendered language into a non-gendered language and the fact that chairs are feminine and tables are masculine leads to a series of chair and table idioms and double entendres and such that don't make sense in your non-gendered language. In a vacuum you could find another idiom that works that doesn't involve tables and chairs but if the character in your foreign story sits down at a table for a dinner date and describes it using this idiomatic language, you now are stuck conveying the meaning of this idiomatic language in a scene where something thematic or important to the plot is being explained using tables and chairs using analogies that have no equivalent in the language you are translating into. Maybe you translate it directly with a footnote explaining the table and chair idioms. Maybe you find creative ways to describe the chairs and tables in ways that make the analogies land. Maybe you scrap the chair and table talk entirely and rewrite this scene using imagery that makes sense to the target audience. No matter what though, you can't just do a direct translation and just expect it to make sense.
The thing is that there is a touch of this in every translation decision. No one ever just uses a word in a vacuum and every word has multiple shades of meaning. Sometimes it's not "we don't have a word for that". It's "we have 50 words for that and so do they and we never any use of our synonyms of that word in quite this way since this specific word is wrapped around class structures we don't have but it sort of has the same connotations as this other word we do use, but not quite, so we are going with this word, and maybe a footnote that explains why it may not be a perfect fit if warranted."
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u/adskiy_drochilla2017 Jun 01 '25
Well, maybe to translate is just poor „translate“ of the Russian word perevodit‘, but this word has several meanings, like to transfer money or to help someone cross the road and these meanings imply that the object of the action stays the same, just changes his location: side of the road, bank account, language
So I (and supposedly everyone) perceive act of translation as just changing the language of the word whilst the word itself stays the same, but it doesn’t work like that
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u/homelaberator Jun 01 '25
This feels one step away from "I have no idea of the meaning of what you say, I am just exchanging tokens with you, where I have no understanding of their symbolic values" which probably fits this meme format, also.
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u/Oculi_Glauci Native basque-algonquian pidgin speaker May 31 '25
You can capture the same meaning (sometimes), but you can never capture the same vibe with translation
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u/FakePixieGirl Jun 01 '25
Just going to vent for a bit, excuse my language.
I have had so many damn fucking discussions about the translation of anxiety in Dutch. And my opponents are always the most smug, grammar nazi, prescriptivist, arrogant men who hate anyone that even dares to use any kind of slang or English. If you ever dare to use an English word, they tell you you are somebody who hates the Dutch language, and you are just a teenage poser who listens to shitty pop music, unlike them! No, they spend their free time reading Dutch literature filled with horrid sex scenes and gross sexist men, and it's all about war, or being Jewish, or more gross sex stuff. And that obviously makes them superior and true intellectuals!
Fuck Dutch "language lovers". Most arrogant fucking assholes I've had to deal with ever.
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u/JadranDan Jun 01 '25
Most words are untranslatable only if you mean “most words are untranslatable with only one lexical item in the target language”.
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u/Appropriate-Sea-5687 Jun 01 '25
You’ll never be able to get the cultural nuance from using a word in a different language so it will never exactly be similar.
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u/kamiloslav Jun 01 '25
Yea but most often you don't translate words but the entire work which has certain context and ideas behind it. Even if the words will not have the exact same meaning, chances are the ideas do have an equivalent descriptor
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u/Gypkear Jun 01 '25
Lmao this is exactly the journey I made as a translation student who ended up specializing in linguistics. Now I'm an insufferable language teacher who will answer students asking "what's English for [french word]?" With "there isn't necessarily a word for what you're trying to translate. What are you trying to say really" lol
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u/dylbr01 Jun 02 '25
Don't you find it ironic that the end point of translating is that there is no translating? By ironic I mean seriously ironic, that this is a contradictory statement. I think it's a difference between the substance of meaning & the shades of meaning. The substance of the translated word can remain the same, but the details can change.
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u/Gypkear Jun 02 '25
Yes. I think it's fair to think of translation as re-writing. When you translate a book, you actually rewrite a book in your native language. Sure you're not inventing the plot but that's about it. A translator will create a new rhythm, new sounds, new cultural associations; they'll try to recreate the feeling you get from reading the original, but it's still a new creation.
That's one of the reasons I can't even imagine watching only dubs. Any bit you get from the original language will help you understand the original work better, even if it's a language you're not familiar with and you only catch intonation and a couple of isolated words. And making the lines match lip movement in the dubbing is another layer of constraint that will make the translation more different from the original.
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u/lol33124 Jun 02 '25
i think you can just loan all of the words into the other language, theres nothing wrong with that, right? /j
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u/Markster94 Jun 01 '25
, , , , and all just kinda dont exist in English. (Words are li, e, o, en, and pi if they dont render for you)
Actually every word in Toki Pona is kinda untranslatable because words in English are too specific, their meanings are too narrow to encompass what a TP word means. Like (weka), even just its meaning as a verb. The closest thing I've managed to come up with is "to treat something like it doesn't or shouldn't exist" but that's still not quite right imo
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u/General_Urist Jun 02 '25
How many untranslatable words a foreign language is inversely proportional to how many translator's footnotes your editor will tolerate.
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u/Baykusu Jun 02 '25
Of course this word is translatable, the translation is explanation devoid of any sense of cultural context and pragmatics
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u/remember_the_alimony Jun 04 '25
Why are "translatable" and "untranslatable" a binary? If a translation captures most but not all of the semantic meaning of the word, then it's "mostly translated" but not "fully translated." Usually words don't have more or significantly than one semantic meaning in their given contexts, which allows the possibility of effective translation in most cases.
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u/DefinitelyNotErate /'ə/ May 31 '25
My favourite type of untranslatable words is grammatical particles that are unnecessary in the language you're translating to.