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>It's really just that we don't have a singular corresponding word, not that they can't be translated. That kinda goes without saying, right? For the converse
by na85 6y ago
>It's really just that we don't have a singular corresponding word, not that they can't be translated.
That kinda goes without saying, right? For the converse to be true there would have to be ideas that cannot be expressed in certain languages, as if they weren't "complete" analogously to Turing Completeness.
And yet there are many words in many languages that don't translate well or directly to/from English. French is a great example, where you have the word préciser which is a verb that, translated literally, means "to precise [something]" as in, to specify or to explain, but neither of those really capture the meaning of préciser. There really isn't a direct translation, but of course I can still make the same though understood in English or in French.
- ajuc 6y agoIt's like with Kolmogorov complexity. The upper bound is translation from "word_x" into "book in your language that teaches you the other language and then says 'word_x'". But just like Kolmogorov complexity the fact that you can technically translate anything and the change in length is finite - doesn't mean it's irrelevant in practice.