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I dislike when people say “this cannot be translated correctly into your language” as it logically doesn’t make sense. perhaps they mean word for word? I’m sur

I dislike when people say “this cannot be translated correctly into your language” as it logically doesn’t make sense. perhaps they mean word for word? I’m sure any language can conjure up a similar feeling and combination of words. Maybe not a literal translation, but by virtue of being a human construct, any language can be crafted and molded into anything.

missosoup 7y ago
Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive and therefore a large number of words phrases and idioms don't have an analogue that makes sense in english. Trying to reduce them to something that makes sense is like trying to explain a joke. It defeats the purpose. Anyone who speaks >1 languages is aware of this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- goto11 7y ago
  > Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive... I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?
  - ulfw 7y ago
    Do you have any justification for calling bullshit on him?
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      I’m not the OP, but the fact that out of the thousands of professional academic linguists, none has ever seriously proposed and defined an “expressiveness scale” suggests that we would need extraordinary evidence to accept an HN comment claiming to have done so.
    - goto11 7y ago
      I have never heard of any objective measure of "expressiveness" of human languages.
    - Avamander 7y ago
      The fact that information density across languages was measured and there was no significant difference[0]. How can a language be more expressive yet contain just as much information. [0]: https://www.science20.com/content/information_density_all_languages_communicate_at_the_same_rate https://www.science20.com/content/information_density_all_la...
  - missosoup 7y ago
    Yeah I speak 3 languages and all 3 have mutually exclusive constructs that can't be translated while carrying over the 'true meaning'. English is by far the least expressive of the 3. A common example is slavic мат. A repertoire of profanities that simply have no English translation, no equivalent, not even a meaningful loose translation/explanation. The best you can do is find the nearest approximate meaningful English construct, but it's a bit like projecting 3d space onto a 2d plane. You fundamentally lose information. I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. The fact that not all languages 1:1 map to each other especially when some classes of languages have fundamentally different constructs like gendered variants of every word, or the fact that some languages are more or less expressive, or the fact that English falls to the side of the less expressive scale. All 3 of these statements are trivial to verify with a couple google searches without even being a multilingual speaker.
    - goto11 7y ago
      I'm calling bullshit on the claim that languages can be placed on a scale of expressiveness. You will first have to define expressiveness and then how to measure it.
    - jgwil2 7y ago
      This is an entirely subjective judgment on your part that you are advancing as though it were a matter of fact. Have you considered the possibility that you know English least well of your three languages, and that you are therefore better able to express yourself in the other two? Also, please provide a source for your "fact" that some languages are inherently more "expressive" than others (whatever that means).
      - missosoup 7y ago
        I provided a trivial and concrete example: мат. English is inherently incapable of expressing мат. And English being my strongest language, I'd say no, I don't think it's because I know it least well of the three. Perhaps this is just something that doesn't make sense to people who only know one language, but it self-evident to multilinguals. If you want a source, click TFA - a list of German expressions that don't exist in English. The discussion here on whether or not it's a great list, but no one disagrees there are phrases that don't exist in English.
filoeleven 7y ago
This reminds me of liget, the feeling of wanting to behead someone. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terrible-emotion-locked-in-a-word https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/5298768... In like with what the sibling commenter wrote, some languages appear to be more expressive than others. The English translator of the book The Last Temptation of Christ wrote about how difficult translating it from its original Greek was, due to the Greek language’s inherent multiple layers of meaning. He gave at least one example, which IIRC took him a few paragraphs to describe all the meaning wrapped up in one sentence, and said that most sentences in the book contained the same richness. So, perhaps “cannot be translated correctly” is better understood to mean that you may have to read pages of footnotes to understand the full meaning of a small phrase. Some cultural constructs that its language relies on are even more deeply rooted, and nothing but a period of immersion in the culture itself will help you to understand it. “Cannot be translated correctly” seems like an adequate shorthand.
davrosthedalek 7y ago
While you can translate the immediate meaning, either word-for-word or with a description, this will not give the full collection of meaning and concepts the word has to the culture it's from. An example in the reverse direction is "accuracy" and "precision", which have different, well established meanings in English, but translate to the same thing in German, "Genauigkeit". Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude are examples where Germans have a wider net of associated concepts around it. To capture all of that, you would have to do more than translate it. For example, there is a commonly understood limit of what Schaden you can have Freude about, and what modifies that limit. I find it fascinating how the existence or non-existence of certain concepts in a language influence our approaches at problem solving.
mamcx 7y ago
> This cannot be translated correctly into your language You must also take in account culture and other adjacent factors. I born in Colombia, and you don't imagine how HARD is to try to translate tech terms to Spanish. Even where a "oficial" translation exist, use it could convey so much wrong ideas that I must use the spanglish version of it most of time (except if the translation is of COMMON use). And the oposite. Is very funny when a foreigner come here and discover that not only need to know spanish, but also the "Colombian" variety and the "my city" variety too. One funny? My brother (know english and work as mandarin translator) list to a foreign friend how many ways we say "hello!". Are DOZENS of it in use here! Several of them are INSULTS! You say an insult to other and we know when is a HELLO! Nuts!
diffeomorphism 7y ago
You can write an essay to describe the concept but that is quite different from translating. What your are arguing is like jumping from "assembly is Turing complete, of course you can implement tail recursion" to "assembly is basically lisp" and that claiming otherwise "logically doesn't make sense". Sure, with lots of effort you can express anything in any language, but there are concepts which are much more easily and naturally expressed in any given language than another.
mumblemumble 7y ago
I don't know about "correctly", but it can definitely be difficult to translate a really good phrase from one language to another in a way that retains both the power and the meaning. For example, Shakespeare is somewhat famously difficult to translate into French. Much of what's great about his writing is in the level of density he was able to achieve by playing with certain parts of English grammar's plasticity, and the strong rhythm he gets by playing with sounds. In French, it's easy enough to translate the meaning, but stricter rules about the use of articles and some characteristics of the language's word morphology make it really hard to achieve the same density, and differences in the phonology make it harder to achieve the same drumming rhythm. Double meanings are also tricky. Different languages offer different opportunities for play with ambiguity, because they generally don't have the same patterns of polysemy.
Avamander 7y ago
Sure, you can translate what it approximately means, but it's nearly impossible to carry the same connotation, rhythm and meaning in a reasonable amount of text. For example the saying in Estonian: "Keelan, käsen, poon ja lasen!" It's often used in the context of someone having too much power, but the tone of the saying is not formal compared to when people start to talk about the separation of the three powers. I suspect the joking/informal tone comes from the fact that the saying rhymes and has a nice rhythm. Direct translation of it, "I forbid, order, hang and shoot!" just doesn't pack the same punch or carry the same meaning because it's not just words that have to be translated. I think that's what people mean by saying "this cannot be translated correctly into your language".

missosoup 7y ago

Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive and therefore a large number of words phrases and idioms don't have an analogue that makes sense in english. Trying to reduce them to something that makes sense is like trying to explain a joke. It defeats the purpose. Anyone who speaks >1 languages is aware of this.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
goto11 7y ago
> Some languages are inherently less expressive than others. English is not very expressive... I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?
- ulfw 7y ago
  Do you have any justification for calling bullshit on him?
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    I’m not the OP, but the fact that out of the thousands of professional academic linguists, none has ever seriously proposed and defined an “expressiveness scale” suggests that we would need extraordinary evidence to accept an HN comment claiming to have done so.
  - goto11 7y ago
    I have never heard of any objective measure of "expressiveness" of human languages.
  - Avamander 7y ago
    The fact that information density across languages was measured and there was no significant difference[0]. How can a language be more expressive yet contain just as much information. [0]: https://www.science20.com/content/information_density_all_languages_communicate_at_the_same_rate https://www.science20.com/content/information_density_all_la...
- missosoup 7y ago
  Yeah I speak 3 languages and all 3 have mutually exclusive constructs that can't be translated while carrying over the 'true meaning'. English is by far the least expressive of the 3. A common example is slavic мат. A repertoire of profanities that simply have no English translation, no equivalent, not even a meaningful loose translation/explanation. The best you can do is find the nearest approximate meaningful English construct, but it's a bit like projecting 3d space onto a 2d plane. You fundamentally lose information. I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. The fact that not all languages 1:1 map to each other especially when some classes of languages have fundamentally different constructs like gendered variants of every word, or the fact that some languages are more or less expressive, or the fact that English falls to the side of the less expressive scale. All 3 of these statements are trivial to verify with a couple google searches without even being a multilingual speaker.
  - goto11 7y ago
    I'm calling bullshit on the claim that languages can be placed on a scale of expressiveness. You will first have to define expressiveness and then how to measure it.
  - jgwil2 7y ago
    This is an entirely subjective judgment on your part that you are advancing as though it were a matter of fact. Have you considered the possibility that you know English least well of your three languages, and that you are therefore better able to express yourself in the other two? Also, please provide a source for your "fact" that some languages are inherently more "expressive" than others (whatever that means).
    - missosoup 7y ago
      I provided a trivial and concrete example: мат. English is inherently incapable of expressing мат. And English being my strongest language, I'd say no, I don't think it's because I know it least well of the three. Perhaps this is just something that doesn't make sense to people who only know one language, but it self-evident to multilinguals. If you want a source, click TFA - a list of German expressions that don't exist in English. The discussion here on whether or not it's a great list, but no one disagrees there are phrases that don't exist in English.

filoeleven 7y ago

This reminds me of liget, the feeling of wanting to behead someone. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/529876861/an-anthropologist-discovers-the-terrible-emotion-locked-in-a-word https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/06/01/5298768... In like with what the sibling commenter wrote, some languages appear to be more expressive than others. The English translator of the book The Last Temptation of Christ wrote about how difficult translating it from its original Greek was, due to the Greek language’s inherent multiple layers of meaning. He gave at least one example, which IIRC took him a few paragraphs to describe all the meaning wrapped up in one sentence, and said that most sentences in the book contained the same richness. So, perhaps “cannot be translated correctly” is better understood to mean that you may have to read pages of footnotes to understand the full meaning of a small phrase. Some cultural constructs that its language relies on are even more deeply rooted, and nothing but a period of immersion in the culture itself will help you to understand it. “Cannot be translated correctly” seems like an adequate shorthand.

davrosthedalek 7y ago

While you can translate the immediate meaning, either word-for-word or with a description, this will not give the full collection of meaning and concepts the word has to the culture it's from. An example in the reverse direction is "accuracy" and "precision", which have different, well established meanings in English, but translate to the same thing in German, "Genauigkeit". Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude are examples where Germans have a wider net of associated concepts around it. To capture all of that, you would have to do more than translate it. For example, there is a commonly understood limit of what Schaden you can have Freude about, and what modifies that limit. I find it fascinating how the existence or non-existence of certain concepts in a language influence our approaches at problem solving.

mamcx 7y ago

> This cannot be translated correctly into your language You must also take in account culture and other adjacent factors. I born in Colombia, and you don't imagine how HARD is to try to translate tech terms to Spanish. Even where a "oficial" translation exist, use it could convey so much wrong ideas that I must use the spanglish version of it most of time (except if the translation is of COMMON use). And the oposite. Is very funny when a foreigner come here and discover that not only need to know spanish, but also the "Colombian" variety and the "my city" variety too. One funny? My brother (know english and work as mandarin translator) list to a foreign friend how many ways we say "hello!". Are DOZENS of it in use here! Several of them are INSULTS! You say an insult to other and we know when is a HELLO! Nuts!

diffeomorphism 7y ago

You can write an essay to describe the concept but that is quite different from translating. What your are arguing is like jumping from "assembly is Turing complete, of course you can implement tail recursion" to "assembly is basically lisp" and that claiming otherwise "logically doesn't make sense". Sure, with lots of effort you can express anything in any language, but there are concepts which are much more easily and naturally expressed in any given language than another.

mumblemumble 7y ago

I don't know about "correctly", but it can definitely be difficult to translate a really good phrase from one language to another in a way that retains both the power and the meaning. For example, Shakespeare is somewhat famously difficult to translate into French. Much of what's great about his writing is in the level of density he was able to achieve by playing with certain parts of English grammar's plasticity, and the strong rhythm he gets by playing with sounds. In French, it's easy enough to translate the meaning, but stricter rules about the use of articles and some characteristics of the language's word morphology make it really hard to achieve the same density, and differences in the phonology make it harder to achieve the same drumming rhythm. Double meanings are also tricky. Different languages offer different opportunities for play with ambiguity, because they generally don't have the same patterns of polysemy.

Avamander 7y ago

Sure, you can translate what it approximately means, but it's nearly impossible to carry the same connotation, rhythm and meaning in a reasonable amount of text. For example the saying in Estonian: "Keelan, käsen, poon ja lasen!" It's often used in the context of someone having too much power, but the tone of the saying is not formal compared to when people start to talk about the separation of the three powers. I suspect the joking/informal tone comes from the fact that the saying rhymes and has a nice rhythm. Direct translation of it, "I forbid, order, hang and shoot!" just doesn't pack the same punch or carry the same meaning because it's not just words that have to be translated. I think that's what people mean by saying "this cannot be translated correctly into your language".