Untranslatable, that's what you are . . .

By MICHAEL CAINES

After the translation prizes, the angels of translation and IKEA’s “fluency” in thirty-one languages, it may be almost a relief to find that there are plenty of words people claim to be untranslatable. Untranslatable in a like-for-like, one-word-for-another way, that is; it seems that the idea behind the word can usually be explained with easy, Johnsonian concision.

For example – have a guess at the meanings of these words, their definitions, and which languages they belong to:

Cwtch (the third one on this list)

Komorebi (fourth paragraph . . .)

Mamihlapinatapai

Qualanquismo (the fourth one down)

Zhaghzhagh (the eighth one down)

If you scored five out of five, and as you’re reading this in English, congratulations – you’re more multilingual than Mario Vargas Llosa. And you have a very interesting and varied family background.

A complement to the helpful online collections for untranslatability from which these words are gathered comes courtesy of sometime TLS contributor Ollie Brock, who is currently a translator in residence at the Free Word Centre (on Farringdon Road, around the corner from the old TLS HQ). An edited version of the first event in a series on a theme of translation, Migration Stories, which I attended, is now available as a podcast. (See the embed above. Press play. Hear the poet Maria Jastrzebska revel in the excitement of the untranslatable! Marvel at the idea of growing up in Ghana, which speaks, “unofficially”, sixty-seven languages! Gasp as Sofia Buchuk permits us to glimpse the Quechuan spiritual world of her grandmother! etc.)

It was a good discussion, although it’s interesting to hear at the end of all this that Ollie Brock himself “doesn’t really believe in the idea of untranslatability”, despite some of his guests’ apparent delight at the irreconcilable differences between languages; that sounds like it might be the necessary attitude for a professional translator.

Comments

[Tom Dawkes]

qualanquismo should be qualUnquismo. In Italian qualunque means 'any', 'whatever'

[Alex D-F]

No word is exactly translatable. I like the comment on a recent post that 'Untranslatability is a statistical phenomenon, not a metaphysical notion' (attributed to Efim Etkind by sergio viaggio of Buenos Aires, commenting at 6,39pm Jan 30, 2013 on this piece: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/28/the-treachery-of-translators/)

[John Angliss]

Then again, is any word translatable? Even when there's a word with a good fit, all the baggage that goes with it in a different language usually produces different associations.

[Andrew McCulloch]

One of my own favourites is 'perlenorek', a word I discovered in Barry Lopez's book 'Arctic Dreams' and which, if memory serves (and that also goes for the spelling), is an Inuit word meaning 'dread of all that is to come', used to describe the feeling of being on the cusp of an Arctic winter. The word itself may not be easily translatable, but the feeling is surely familiar enough.
Oddly, Google produces only one result (itself unique in my experience) in what looks like Turkish. Can anyone shed any light?

[Gigi Santow]

Struck by comment 2 ("No word is exactly translatable") and comment 3 ("is any word translatable?") I tried to think of everyday words that had obvious uncontroversial equivalents. What about colour, I thought? Surely that's pretty obvious. Blue, for example, but then I thought again. In Indonesian, blue is biru, which does suggest that there may not have been a (Malay-origin) word before Europeans arrived (I don't know Javanese and perhaps they have a different word). In Java it was not uncommon to have one's garden praised for its blueness; and the man who made shirts for my husband was perfectly capable of putting blue buttons on a green shirt, and vice versa, and did so, to our dismay. There is a perfectly good word for green that owes nothing to Europe (hijau). Does this take us away from language and into the realms of blue-green colour-blindness, or something else?

Perhaps left and right are always perfectly translatable. Oh dear, I think again: there may be words but perhaps they're not well understood. In central Java one pointed to the shelf behind the shopkeeper and explained that one wanted the cake of soap that was to the north.

Language is wonderful.

[南京人]

re: gigi santow's comment... and in russian there are totally unrelated words for light and dark blue; and Chinese has words for blue and green, and another word (青) that could be either. aaaaaaaaand not to mention all the baggage behind right-correct-righteous (droit! recht! derecho! pravo!) and left-sinister (links! gauche!) which doesn't translate into Asian languages...fully committed to translatability as relativity. But I think we pretend too much that languages are discreet separate system we have whole access to. As though any of our Englishes were the same!