Untranslatability
Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation. It is based on the notion that there are certain concepts and words that are so interrelated that an accurate translation becomes an impossible task. Some writers have suggested that language carries sacred notions or is intrinsic to national identity. Brian James Baer posits that untranslatability is sometimes seen by nations as proof of the national genius. He quotes Alexandra Jaffe: "When translators talk about untranslatable, they often reinforce the notion that each language has its own 'genius', an 'essence' that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the 'soul' of its culture or people".
A translator, however, can resort to a number of translation procedures to compensate for a lexical gap. From this perspective, untranslatability does not carry deep linguistic relativity implications. Meaning can virtually always be translated, if not always technically accurate.
Theories
There is a school of thought identified with Walter Benjamin that identifies the concept of "sacred" in relation to translation and this pertains to the text that is untranslatable because its meaning and letter cannot be disassociated. It stems from the view that translation should realize the imagined perfect relationship with the original text. This theory highlights the paradoxical nature of translation wherein it—as a process—assumes the forms of necessity and impossibility at the same time. This is demonstrated in Jacques Derrida's analysis of the myth of Babel, a word which he described as a name that means confusion and also a proper name of God. Furthermore, Derrida noted that when God condemned the world to a multiplicity of tongues, he created a paradoxical need and impossibility of translation.Derrida himself has put forward his own notion of the untranslatability of the text, arguing in his early works such as the Writing and Difference and Margins of Philosophy that there is an excess of untranslatable meaning in literature and these cannot be reduced to a closed system or a restricted economy "in which there is nothing that cannot be made to make sense."
Brian James Baer posits that untranslatability is sometimes seen by nations as proof of its national genius. Literature that can be easily translated may be considered as lacking originality, while translated work themselves may be regarded merely as imitations. Baer quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau defining true genius as "the kind that creates and makes everything out of nothing". Paraphrasing Robert Frost's remark about poetry, Baer suggests that "one could define national identity as that which is lost in translation". He further quotes Alexandra Jaffe: "When translators talk about untranslatable, they often reinforce the notion that each language has its own 'genius', an 'essence' that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the 'soul' of its culture or people".
Quite often, a text or utterance that is considered to be "untranslatable" is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. That is, there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A translator can, however, resort to a number of translation procedures to compensate for this. From this perspective, untranslatability or difficulty of translation does not always carry deep linguistic relativity implications; denotation can virtually always be translated, given enough circumlocution, although connotation may be ineffable or inefficient to convey.
Translation procedures
N.B.: The majority of examples and illustrations given below will involve translating to or from the English language.The translation procedures that are available in cases of lacunae, or lexical gaps, include the following:
Adaptation
An adaptation, also known as a free translation, is a procedure whereby the translator replaces a term with cultural connotations, where those connotations are restricted to readers of the original language text, with a term with corresponding cultural connotations that would be familiar to readers of the translated text.For example, in the Belgian comic book The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin's canine sidekick Milou is translated as Snowy in English, Bobbie in Dutch, Kuttus in Bengali, and Struppi in German; likewise the detectives Dupont and Dupond become Thomson and Thompson in English, Jansen and Janssen in Dutch, Jonson and Ronson in Bengali, Schultze and Schulze in German, Hernández and Fernández in Spanish, 杜本 and 杜朋 in Chinese, Dyupon and Dyuponn in Russian and Skafti and Skapti in Icelandic.
Adaptation is often used when translating poetry, works of theatre, and advertising.
Borrowing
Borrowing is a translation procedure whereby the translator uses a word or expression from the source text in the target text unmodified.In English text, borrowings not sufficiently anglicised are normally in italics.
Calque
Calque entails taking an expression, breaking it down to individual elements and translating each element into the target language word for word. For example, the German word :de:Alleinvertretungsanspruch|Alleinvertretungsanspruch can be calqued to "single-representation-claim", but a proper translation would result in "exclusive mandate". Word-by-word translations may have comic value, but can be a means to save as much of the original style as possible, especially when the source text is ambiguous or undecipherable to the translator.Paraphrase
Paraphrase, sometimes called periphrasis, is a translation procedure whereby the translator replaces a word in the source text by a group of words or an expression in the target text. For example, the Portuguese word saudade is often translated into English as 'the feeling of missing a person who is gone'. A similar example is dor in Romanian, translated into English as 'missing someone or something that's gone and/or not available at the time'.An example of untranslatability is seen in the Dutch language through the word gezelligheid, which does not have an English equivalent, though the German equivalent Gemütlichkeit is sometimes used. Literally, it means a 'cozy, friendly, or nice atmosphere', but can also connote time spent with loved ones, the fact of seeing a friend after a long absence, the friendliness or chattiness of a specific person, or a general sense of togetherness. Such gaps can lead to word borrowing, as with pajamas or Zeitgeist.
Translator's note
A translator's note is a note added by the translator to the target text to provide additional information pertaining to the limits of the translation, the cultural background, or any other explanations.Examples
Register
Although Thai has words that can be used as equivalent to English "I", "you", or "he/she/it", they are relatively formal terms. In most cases, Thai people use words which express the relation between speaker and listener according to their respective roles. For instance, for a mother to say to her child "I'll tell you a story", she would say "แม่จะเล่านิทานให้ลูกฟัง", or "Mother will tell child a story". Similarly, older and younger friends will often use sibling terminology, so that an older friend telling a younger friend "You're my friend" would be "น้องเป็นเพื่อนพี่", would translate directly as "Younger sibling is older sibling’s friend". To be translated into English correctly, it is proper to use "I" and "you" for these example statements, but normal Thai perceptions of relation are lost in the process.Similar phenomena can also be observed in Indonesian. One may use the formal form of pronouns, which are generally distinct from the informal/familiar forms; however, the use of these pronouns does not evoke sufficient friendliness or intimacy, especially in spoken language. Instead of saying "Anda mau pesan apa?", a waiter/waitress will most likely say "Bapak/Ibu mau pesan apa?". Both expressions are equally polite; however, the latter is more sympathetic and friendly. When conversing with family and relatives, most Indonesians also prefer using kinship terminology when addressing older family members. When addressing younger family members, informal pronouns are more prevalent.
Grammar
Possession
Translating the English word "have" to Arabic, Finnish, Hebrew, Hindi, Irish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Turkish, Urdu, or Welsh, is somewhat difficult, as there is no specific verb with this meaning in these languages. Instead, for "I have X" these languages use a combination of words that mean "X is to me"; or "at me is X"; "my X exists" or "at me exists X"; or "there-is of-me X."In Hungarian, there is a word corresponding to "have": bír—but its use is quite scarce today, usually turning up in very formal and legal texts. It also sounds outdated, since it was used to translate the Latin habeo and the German haben possessive verbs when these languages had official status in Hungary. The general grammatical construction used is "there is a X of mine". For example, the English sentence "I have a car." translates to Hungarian as "Van egy kocsim." which would translate back to English word-by-word as "There is a car of mine."
A similar construction occurs in Russian, where "I have" translates literally into "at me there is". Russian does have a word that means "to have": иметь —but it is very rarely used by Russian speakers in the same way English speakers use the word "have". In some cases, it may be misinterpreted as vulgar slang for the subject rudely using the object for sexual gratification; for example, in an inept translation of "Do you have a wife?"
In Japanese, the English verb "to have" is most often translated into the verbs iru and aru. The former verb is used to indicate the presence of a person, animal, or other living creature while the latter verb is closer to the English "to have" and is used for inanimate objects. "I have a pen" becomes "Watashi ni wa pen ga aru" which can be represented in English as "I pen exists". To indicate the English "have" in the sense of possession, the Japanese language uses the verb motsu, which literally means 'to carry'. This could be used as "Kare wa keitai wo motteiru", which becomes "He cellphone is carrying" or "He has a cellphone".
Verb forms
English lacks some grammatical categories.There is no simple way in English to contrast Finnish kirjoittaa or Polish pisać and kirjoitella or pisywać. Also, hypätä and skoczyć and hyppiä and skakać are another example.
Irish allows the prohibitive mood to be used in the passive voice. The effect is used to prohibit something while expressing society's disapproval for that action at the same time. For example, contrast Ná caithigí tobac, which uses the second person plural in the imperative meaning "Do not smoke", with Ní caitear tobac, which is best translated as 'Smoking just isn't done here', uses the autonomous imperative meaning 'One does not smoke'.
Italian has three distinct declined past tenses, where fui, ero, and sono stato all mean 'I was'. The first indicates a concluded action in the past, the second a progressive or habitual action in the past, and the latter an action that holds some connection to the present, especially if a recent time is specified. The passato remoto is often used for narrative history. Nowadays, the difference between passato remoto and passato prossimo is blurred in the spoken language, the latter being used in both situations. What difference there exists is partly geographic. In the north of Italy the passato remoto is very rarely used in everyday speech, whereas in the south it often takes the place of the passato prossimo. The distinction is only alive in Tuscany, which makes it dialectal even if hardline purists insist it should be applied consistently.
Likewise, English lacks a productive grammatical means to show indirection but must instead rely on periphrasis, that is the use of multiple words to explain an idea. Finnish grammar, on the contrary, allows the regular production of a series of verbal derivatives, each of which involves a greater degree of indirection. For example, on the basis of the verb vetää, it is possible to produce:
- vetää,
- vedättää,
- vedätyttää,
- vedätätyttää.
| Finnish | English | Translation/paraphrase of boldface verb |
| Hevonen vetää. | A horse pulls. | pulls |
| Ajomies vedättää. | A driver commands the horse to pull. | causes something to pull |
| Urakoitsija vedätyttää. | A subcontractor directs the driver to command the horse to pull. | causes someone to cause something to pull |
| Yhtiö vedätätyttää. | The corporation assigns the subcontractor to have the driver command the horse to pull. | causes someone to cause someone to cause something to pull |
Hindi has a similar concept of indirection. Karna means 'to do'; karaana means 'to make someone do'; karwaana means 'to get someone to make yet another person do'.
Most Turkic languages contain the grammatical verb suffix miş, which indicates that the speaker did not witness the act personally but surmises or has discovered that the act has occurred or was told of it by another, as in the example of Gitmiş!, which can be expressed in English as "it is reported that he/she/it has gone", or, most concisely, as "apparently, he/she/it has gone". This grammatical form is especially used when telling jokes, or narrating stories.
Similar to the Turkic miş, nearly every Quechua sentence is marked by an evidential clitic, indicating the source of the speaker's knowledge. The enclitic =mi expresses personal knowledge ; =si expresses hearsay knowledge ; =chá expresses high probability. Colloquially, the latter is also used when the speaker has dreamed the event told in the sentence or experienced it while intoxicated.
Languages that are extremely different from each other, like English and Chinese, need their translations to be more like adaptations. Chinese has no tenses per se, only three aspects. The English verb "to be" does not have a direct equivalent in Chinese. In an English sentence where "to be" leads to an adjective, there is no "to be" in Chinese. If it states a location, the verb zài is used, as in "We are in the house". In some other cases, the judgment verb shì is used, as in "I am the leader." And in most other cases, such structure is simply not used, but some more natural structure in Chinese is used instead. Any sentence that requires a play on those different meanings will not work the same way in Chinese. In fact, very simple concepts in English can sometimes be difficult to translate, for example, there is no single direct translation for the word "yes" in Chinese, as in Chinese the affirmative is said by repeating the verb in the question.
Vocabulary
, Dutch and Danish have a wealth of modal particles that are particularly difficult to translate as they convey sense or tone rather than strictly grammatical information. The most infamous example perhaps is doch, which roughly means "Don't you realize that... ?" or "In fact it is so, though someone is denying it." What makes translating such words difficult is their different meanings depending on intonation or the context.A common use of the word doch can be found in the German sentence Der Krieg war doch noch nicht verloren, which translates to The war wasn't lost yet, after all or The war was still not lost.
Several other grammatical constructs in English may be employed to translate these words for each of their occurrences. The same Der Krieg war doch noch nicht verloren with slightly changed pronunciation can also mean excuse in defense to a question: ... but the war was not lost yet.
A use which relies heavily on intonation and context could produce yet another meaning: "So the war was really not over yet."
Another change of intonation makes the sentence a question. Der Krieg war doch noch nicht verloren? would translate into " the war was not yet lost ?"
Another well-known example comes from the Portuguese or Spanish verbs ser and estar, both translatable as to be. However, ser is used only with essence or nature, while estar is used with states or conditions. Sometimes this information is not very relevant for the meaning of the whole sentence and the translator will ignore it, whereas at other times it can be retrieved from the context.
When none of these apply, the translator will usually use a paraphrase or simply add words that can convey that meaning. The following example comes from Portuguese:
Some South Slavic words that have no English counterparts are doček, a gathering organized at someone's arrival ; and limar, a sheet metal worker.
Family
often varies across languages. Terms are often too specific or too general to translate into another language. Some rules used for defining kinship terminology include the following:Paternal or maternal. For example, Nordic languages, Indo-Aryan languages and Chinese languages distinguish paternal and maternal relatives such as paternal grandmother and maternal grandmother. Conversely, son's son and daughter's son are also distinguished. Similarly, aunts and uncles are further divided in many languages.
Gender. Whereas English kinship terms make clear distinction between genders, many languages do not. For example, Thai does not distinguish between siblings by gender, but only by age. Thai also disregards gender when aunts or uncles are younger than their parents. Thai also has one word for all nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. On the flip side, the English word cousins does not distinguish gender, but many languages do, included Romance languages, Slavic languages and Chinese languages.
By blood or by marriage. For example, the English word uncle can refer to a parent's brother, or a husband of a parent's sibling. Many languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, Hungarian and Chinese distinguish these.
Full or half sibling. In Arabic, "brother" is often translated into أخ. However, whilst this word may describe a brother who shares either one or both parents, there is a separate word - شقيق - to describe a brother with whom one shares both parents.
Age relative to oneself or one's parent. For example in Bengali, father's elder brothers are called Jethu ' while younger brothers are called Kaku. Their wives are called Jethi-ma and Kaki-ma, respectively. Another common issue is translating brother or sister into Chinese or Japanese, which have separate words for older and younger ones.
Relations by marriage
There is no standard English word for the Italian "", Yiddish "makhatunim", Spanish "consuegros" or Portuguese "consogros": a gender-neutral collective plural like "co-in-laws". If Harry marries Sally, then in Yiddish, Harry's father is the "mekhutn" of Sally's father; each mother is the "makheteyneste" of the other. In Romanian, they are “cuscri”. In Bengali, both fathers are beayi and mothers, beyan. Bengali has dada/bhai for brother and jamai-babu/bhagni-pati for brother-in-law; chhele for son and jamai for son-in-law.Spanish and Portuguese contrast "brother" with "brother-in-law" ; "son" with "son-in-law", and similarly for female relatives like "sister-in-law" and "daughter-in-law". Both languages use "concuño" or "concuñado/concunhado", as the relationship between two men that marry siblings. In the English language this relationship would be lumped in with "cuñado/cunhado" as simply "brother-in-law".
Serbian and Bosnian have specific terms for relations by marriage. For example, a "sister-in-law" can be a "snaha/snaja", "zaova", "svastika" or "jetrva". A "brother-in-law" can be a "zet", "djever/dever", "šurak/šurjak" or "badžanak/pašenog". Likewise, the term "prijatelj" is also used. Bengali has a number of in-law words. For example, Boudi, Shaali, Shaala, Sambandhi, Bhaasur, Deor Nanad, Jaa, etc.
In Russian, fifteen different words cover relations by marriage, enough to confuse many native speakers. There are for example, as in Yiddish, words like "сват" and "сватья" for "co-in-laws". To further complicate the translator's job, Russian in-laws may choose to address each other familiarly by these titles.
In contrast to all of the above fine distinctions, in American English the term "my brother-in-law" covers "my spouse's brother", "my sibling's husband", and "my spouse's sibling's husband". In British English, the last of these is not considered strictly correct.
Work and school relations
Japanese has a concept, amae, about the closeness of parent-child relationship, that is supposedly unique to that language and culture as it applies to bosses and workers.Japanese and Chinese have words for classmates and colleagues of different seniority and/or gender. The most well-known example to English speakers is probably the Japanese word 先輩, referring to a senior classmate or colleague.
Foreign objects
Objects unknown to a culture can actually be easy to translate. For example, in Japanese, wasabi わさび is a plant used as a spicy Japanese condiment. Traditionally, this plant only grows in Japan. It would be unlikely that someone from Angola would have a clear understanding of it. However, the easiest way to translate this word is to borrow it. Or one can use a similar vegetable's name to describe it. In English this word is translated as wasabi or Japanese horseradish. In Chinese, people can still call it wasabi by its Japanese sound, or pronounce it by its Hanzi characters, 山葵. However, wasabi is more frequently called 芥末 or 绿芥 in China and Taiwan, meaning mustard. One may specify yellow mustard and green mustard to avoid confusion.Another method is using description instead of a single word. For example, languages like Russian and Ukrainian have borrowed words Kuraga and Uruk from Turkic languages. While both fruits are now known to the Western world, there are still no terms for them in English. English speakers have to use "dried apricot without core" and "dried apricot with core" instead.
One particular type of foreign object that poses difficulties is the proper noun. As an illustration, consider another example from Douglas Hofstadter, which he published in one of his "Metamagical Themas" columns in Scientific American. He pondered the question, Who is the first lady of Britain? Well, first ladies reside at the prime minister's address, and at the time, the woman living at 10 Downing Street was Margaret Thatcher. But a different attribute that first ladies have is that they are married to heads of government, so perhaps a better answer was "Denis" Thatcher, but he probably would not have relished the title.
Poetry, puns and wordplay
The two areas which most nearly approach total untranslatability are poetry and puns; poetry is difficult to translate because of its reliance on the sounds and rhythms of the source language; puns, and other similar semantic wordplay, because of how tightly they are tied to the original language. The oldest well-known examples are probably those appearing in Bible translations, for example, Genesis 2:7, which explains why God gave Adam this name: "God created Adam out of soil from the ground"; the original Hebrew text reveals the secret, since the word Adam connotes the word ground, whereas translating the verse into other languages loses the original pun.Similarly, consider the Italian adage "traduttore, traditore": a literal translation is "translator, traitor". The pun is lost, though the meaning persists.
That being said, many of the translation procedures discussed here can be used in these cases. For example, the translator can compensate for an "untranslatable" pun in one part of a text by adding a new pun in another part of the translated text.
Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest incorporates in its title a pun that conflates the name Ernest with the adjective of quality earnest. The French title of the translated play is "L'importance d'être Constant", replicating and transposing the pun; however, the character Ernest had to be renamed, and the allusion to trickery was lost. and "Il est important d'être Aimé" A recent Hungarian translation of the same play by Ádám Nádasdy applied a similar solution, giving the subtitle "Szilárdnak kell lenni" beside the traditional title "Bunbury", where "Szilárd" is a male name as well as an adjective meaning "solid, firm", or "steady". Other languages, like Spanish, usually leave the pun untranslated, as in "La importancia de llamarse Ernesto", while one translation used the name Severo, which means "severe" or "serious", close to the original English meaning. Catalan translations always use "La importància de ser Frank". This example uses the homophones "Frank" and "franc". Although this same solution would work in Spanish also, it carries heavy political connotations in Spain due to Francisco Franco's dictatorship, to a point that even this possible title can be taken directly as ironic/sarcastic: literally, "The importance of being Franco", so this alternative was never used. However, the German translation "Ernst sein ist alles" only changes the name very slightly, in fact - unlike the equivalents in English - the adjective ernst is even spelt exactly as the name Ernst and, given the position at the beginning of the title, both meanings would be capitalised.
The Asterix comic strip is renowned for its French puns; its translators have found many ingenious English substitutes.
Other forms of wordplay, such as spoonerisms and palindromes are equally difficult, and often force hard choices on the translator. For example, take the classic palindrome: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama". A translator might choose to translate it literally into, say, French – "Un homme, un projet, un canal: Panama", if it were used as a caption for a photo of Theodore Roosevelt, and sacrifice the palindrome. But if the text is meant to give an example of a palindrome, he might elect to sacrifice the literal sense and substitute a French palindrome, such as "Un roc lamina l'animal cornu".
Douglas Hofstadter discusses the problem of translating a palindrome into Chinese, where such wordplay is theoretically impossible, in his book Le Ton beau de Marot – which is devoted to the issues and problems of translation, with particular emphasis on the translation of poetry. Another example given by Hofstadter is the translation of the jabberwocky poem by Lewis Carroll, with its wealth of neologisms and portmanteau words, into a number of foreign tongues.
A notable Irish joke is that it is not possible to translate :wikt:mañana|mañana into Irish as the Irish "don't have a word that conveys that degree of urgency".