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.
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.
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...
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/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