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Language Log have been demolishing this ludicrous nonsense for over a decade now[1]. You'd think people would learn. [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll

Language Log have been demolishing this ludicrous nonsense for over a decade now[1]. You'd think people would learn. [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2741 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2741 > But what is the notion of untranslatability here? It seems to have been confused with "lack of an exact one-word equivalent". Who on earth ever argued that translatability only exists when source text words are mapped bijectively to target words, each with exactly the same shade of meaning as the corresponding source word? Does French jeune fille fail to translate English girl, and ne … pas fail to translate not? Does English fall down fail to translate French tomber, and look at fail to translate regarder? What kind of madness is this?

dmitriid 6y ago
Such words are the nightmares of people who translate fiction. Because if in the original you have "toska", you can't really translate it as "dull ache of the soul stemming from longing or pining" as that would surely break the flow of the text. So they might be untranslatable in certain contexts, for sure, and you have to scramble for alternatives which inevitably lose subtle shades of meaning.
- dazzawazza 6y ago
  Given that the act of reading is lossy, I don't think this matters too much.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    It matters a great deal. For example, Bagheera is female in Russian translations. This breaks the entire notion of Bagheera being an older male friend to Mowgly. This also makes some parts of the books nonsensical. All the characters in Winnie the Pooh represent a group of school boys. When Kanga shows up, it upends their world. In the canonical Russian translation and animation Owl is a fussy old lady. Which reduces all shades of meaning. These are simple works of fiction, and already they are greatly reduced just by the singular gender choices made by translators. And there are dozens to hundreds of such choices per book. Complex books like Too Like Lightning may be even untranslatable entirely because TLL rests on gender ambiguity. Russian has gender even in verbs, so you can see a character's gender even in simple phrases like "I did" which are ambiguous in English. etc. etc. etc.
- narag 6y ago
  Such words are the nightmares of people who translate fiction. Translators that work dubbing movies have harder constraints and seldom fail to make sense, only when there're wordplays or words that sound similar to others...
  - ajuc 6y ago
    They also have much more context to work with. Compare "Fuck" said with mad, resigned and amazed voice. It's 3 different words in some languages. Or compare a line "Our hero heard someone crying 'I loved her' from the crowd". In some languages depending what grammatical gender is the person shouting the word ending in 'love' is different. English books often skip that information, so the translator has to deduce or ask the author who was shouting that line. In a movie you know because you can see that person or hear the voice.
    - viceroyalbean 6y ago
      I remember reading one example of this in an interview with the Swedish translator of the Harry Potter books. At some point a grandmother (I believe Neville's) is mentioned. In Swedish, it is impossible (at least while sounding remotely natural) to say "grandmother" without specifying whether it's the maternal or paternal grandmother. The translator had to just guess, and ended up being wrong when more context was given in a later book.
      - JoeSmithson 6y ago
        I believe it's also the case that there is no word for "uncle" in Swedish. This makes more sense to me because your relationship to your mother's brother is actually meaningfully different to your mother's sister's husband.
  - Semaphor 6y ago
    They seldom fail to make sense, but they sound unnatural 99% of the time.
  - fergonco 6y ago
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > you have to scramble for alternatives which inevitably lose subtle shades of meaning That would be "difficult to translate", then, not "untranslatable", no? As for breaking the flow of the text, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to do that anyway translating Russian to English.
  - ivanbakel 6y ago
    >That would be "difficult to translate", then, not "untranslatable", no? Where would you draw the line? No culture has a concept which is literally unexplainable to any other. Translators could potentially give meaning-for-meaning accurate translations if it were desirable, or possible, to give each word a paragraph of qualifiers and contexts. But translators are restricted to at least trying to preserve the structure of the translated work, and for words that means trying to pick a one- or two-word substitute. Some words just don't have an accurate substitute. You can easily pick translations which are "not wrong", but none would be correct. What would you call those words, if not "untranslatable"?
  - ajuc 6y ago
    Word puns are sometimes impossible to translate (at least without teaching the other person the part of language it depends on). Example: A Pole, a German and a Russian meet the devil. He locks each one of them in a cell, gives them two small marbles each and tells them they have a month to impress him with them, or he'll eat them otherwise. So he comes back after a month and sees that the German's cell is full of complicated mathematical formulas and one marble is perfectly balanced on top of the other. He nods his head and moves on to the Russian's cell to see him doing one-handed pushups while juggling the marbles with the other hand. The devil nods again and moves to the Pole's cell, only to see that he lost one marble and broke the other one. Is it funny? Because it's pretty good in Polish and I don't know how to translate it withotu longwinded explanation. The problem is that the word "zepsuć" used for "breaking the marble" means "to spoil" or "to make something nonfunctional without destroying it physically". In English "break" is overloaded and people assume other meaning. So the Pole in the joke managed to make the marble stop doing what marbles do without damaging it.
    - 6y ago
- rgoulter 6y ago
  Sure. But, I enjoy prozd's short sketch on "official subs vs fansubs" in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo (It demonstrates translation where an 'official' one is lossy, but the fansub tries to be more faithful).
narag 6y ago
The article seems like a pretext to give some interesting appearance to very worn out cliches. Sobremesa means afternoon if you're not trying to be pedantic. If you are, it's after-lunch instead of after-noon.
- Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  It doesn't just mean afternoon. It's not only a temporal noun, it's related to an activity. You wouldn't enter the office and wish your coworkers "buena sobremesa". Or if you did, they would probably understand that you are mocking them for being idle at work.
- wenc 6y ago
  'Sobremesa' in Portuguese means dessert. Literally it is sobre (over) + mesa (table).
ivanbakel 6y ago
>You'd think people would learn. Learn what? The link just goes into a long bit of semantics stemming from the author's personal dislike of how other people use "untranslatable" as a word. There's nothing to "learn" from it, because it's a nothingburger. Meanwhile, most if not all language teaching that goes on today still does treat translation as bijection. Students are constantly asked to remember "the word for X in language Y". While that might be a good-enough approximation, it also majorly encourages the idea that that's how translation itself works - so people might be forgiven trying to set the record straight by pointing out that many words are "untranslatable" that way.
- signal11 6y ago
  > the author's personal dislike of how other people use "untranslatable" as a word Language Log isn't a personal blog, it's a group blog run by some fairly distinguished linguists, and their[1] point about bijection is coherently argued and deserves consideration. > most if not all language teaching that goes on today still does treat translation as bijection I'm not convinced - beyond beginner-level one quickly realizes that translation is not one-to-one. Is there a citation for this? [1] 'Their' because "no word for X" is a running joke in LL: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1081 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1081
  - ivanbakel 6y ago
    >I'm not convinced - beyond beginner-level one quickly realizes that translation is not one-to-one. You don't believe the vast majority of language teaching happens at the beginner level? I certainly do, and it would be most people's only first-hand exposure to any kind of translation.
    - signal11 6y ago
      I should clarify that by beginner-level I meant "alphabet book level". A for apple, B for balai, C for conejo, etc. At beginner level language teaching, beyond the first few lessons, you run into words that are difficult to translate bijectively, e.g. ser/estar while learning Spanish from English.
Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
That view only makes sense if you view translation as purely an encoding process: "let's express in language B exactly the same meaning as in language A". Then sure, you can always do it (as far as I know) if you are willing to accept an unbounded encoding length. Even in a language from an isolated tribe who has never seen a train, you could painstakingly describe all the details of a plain. However, that seems to me like an over-reductionistic view of translation. Typically, in all except highly technical contexts, you don't only want to convey meaning, you want to keep at least a modicum of naturalness, the feeling that your translated sentence is something that a native speaker of language B might really say. With that in view, I think it makes sense to say that there are words that are untranslatable in practice. Meaning is not lost, naturalness is. For example, to say "facepalm" in Spanish you would have to say something like "I place my hand on my face in frustration". Does that convey the meaning? Sure. Has any Spanish speaker ever said it? I highly doubt it, except for the joke of trying to translate something that just doesn't lend itself to it.
- kqr 6y ago
  Right, but it feels like you're already moving the goalposts slightly. The word "facepalm" is rarely meant to convey the literal act of slapping the forehead, but rather to communicate the resigned frustration associated with it. Surely, also Spanish people have ways to express resigned frustration?
  - Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
    I think it's quite frecuently meant to convey the literal act. If I search for the word in the news, I get lots of examples of it (this is just the first: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-retweeted-clip-of-fauci-face-palming-behind-him-2020-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-retweeted-...). Obviously, if you are using it in an internet forum you're probably not literally facepalming, just as if you use "lol" you're not laughing out loud, but even in these cases, I don't think that means that you can entirely decouple the word from the gesture. At least for me, when I read the word, what I imagine is someone facepalming. There are several other ways to express resigned frustration (a sigh, a shake of the head) but they are not the same even if they are ways of expressing the same.
paganel 6y ago
Nothing was "demolished", nothing can be "demolished" in this regard, as many of the people who speak and read two or more languages fluently will attest. For one thing, many of the swear words/expressions cannot be translated, not even by using more than one word/a few words, there are languages where one can fill entire books with swear-words/expressions (one of them is Romanian, which I speak natively, I've heard the same thing about Russian or Hungarian) and there are languages where swear words/expressions are a lot less diverse (English is the example I know best). Of course, one can try to naively translate the "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mamii tale!" into the English "I will insert my dick into your mother's dead people", but this naive translation doesn't (can't) catch the word inversion "băga-mi-aș" (from "mi-aș băga") which makes the whole action sound a lot more dynamic and direct in Romanian, plus the word "pula" has a lot more meanings and context in Romanian compared to the simpler uses of "dick" in English, and last but not least the Anglo world seems not to care about one's dead people as much as we Romanians do (and I think we're not the only ones), and as such mentioning some other person's dead close relatives in a derogatory way is seen at most as quaint (while "morții tăi!"/"your dead people!" in Romanian is oftentimes used as a swear expression all by itself, I know I use it frequently). And this before we get to all the diminutives/suffixes that can be added to any word that is part of a swear expression (and not only) in a language like Romanian, a feature that is absent from most of the English language. For example the mentioned above example can very be easily changed into: > "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mămițicii tale!" with the "mamii" to "mămățicii" change (basically from "your mother" to "your little mother", where "little" actually means "more loved"/closer to the person being addressed) giving the whole swear expression a new other, even more personal feeling.
- rootbear 6y ago
  My Hungarian friend has often complained about how poor English is in comparison to his native Hungarian as a language for swearing. From your example, I'd say Hungarian swearing is stylistically similar to Romanian. He also told me about his favorite untranslatable Hungarian word, "bezzeg", which has to be handled on a case-by-case basis when translating into English.
  - horsawlarway 6y ago
aiilns 6y ago
While others have already written great replies arguing for untranslatability, I'll add my own views as well (as a trilingual, non-native English speaker). I think what's immediately wrong in your argument is equating untranslatability with exact one-word equivalent. Then instead of arguing against untranslatability, you argue that translation isn't just equating word for word. I agree with that. Most everyone I think agrees with that. What's missing from that view is that different cultures mean different ways of viewing and experiencing the world, which necessitates different ways of expressing oneself, that is, different words and expressions. Words and expressions carrying a "cultural weight" so to speak, containing deep meaningful connections with its people and their history. A talented person with excellent knowledge of two languages and great skill using at least one of them (being themselves an author, or a poet) can translate great works from the other language. And yet the resulting work may not be able to convey every nuance of the original. Try it if you speak another language and read both the translated version and the original of a great work of literature and you'll see what I mean.
- lhorie 6y ago
  > Try it if you speak another language and read both the translated version and the original of a great work of literature and you'll see what I mean. Agreed. There's an even simpler way to experience this: jokes and puns. Often times, they are untranslatable because their literal meaning is nonsensical and all of its expressiveness comes from timing/context, play on words and/or a local cultural references. By the time you've explained a joke, it has already lost its effect. There's a curious story among diplomatic translators where in a live diplomatic meeting, one of the parties blurted out a joke and the interpreter, attempting to accurately set the mood, translated it as "X just blurted out an untranslatable joke, please laugh heartily"!
CogitoCogito 6y ago
I don't even see why we need to bring multiple languages into the picture. Different people have (sometimes not so) subtle different understandings of the meanings of different words. By a similar notion of "untranslatability", I feel like similar arguments would basically mean that a single language is untranslatable between two native speakers.

dmitriid 6y ago

Such words are the nightmares of people who translate fiction. Because if in the original you have "toska", you can't really translate it as "dull ache of the soul stemming from longing or pining" as that would surely break the flow of the text. So they might be untranslatable in certain contexts, for sure, and you have to scramble for alternatives which inevitably lose subtle shades of meaning.

dazzawazza 6y ago
Given that the act of reading is lossy, I don't think this matters too much.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  It matters a great deal. For example, Bagheera is female in Russian translations. This breaks the entire notion of Bagheera being an older male friend to Mowgly. This also makes some parts of the books nonsensical. All the characters in Winnie the Pooh represent a group of school boys. When Kanga shows up, it upends their world. In the canonical Russian translation and animation Owl is a fussy old lady. Which reduces all shades of meaning. These are simple works of fiction, and already they are greatly reduced just by the singular gender choices made by translators. And there are dozens to hundreds of such choices per book. Complex books like Too Like Lightning may be even untranslatable entirely because TLL rests on gender ambiguity. Russian has gender even in verbs, so you can see a character's gender even in simple phrases like "I did" which are ambiguous in English. etc. etc. etc.
narag 6y ago
Such words are the nightmares of people who translate fiction. Translators that work dubbing movies have harder constraints and seldom fail to make sense, only when there're wordplays or words that sound similar to others...
- ajuc 6y ago
  They also have much more context to work with. Compare "Fuck" said with mad, resigned and amazed voice. It's 3 different words in some languages. Or compare a line "Our hero heard someone crying 'I loved her' from the crowd". In some languages depending what grammatical gender is the person shouting the word ending in 'love' is different. English books often skip that information, so the translator has to deduce or ask the author who was shouting that line. In a movie you know because you can see that person or hear the voice.
  - viceroyalbean 6y ago
    I remember reading one example of this in an interview with the Swedish translator of the Harry Potter books. At some point a grandmother (I believe Neville's) is mentioned. In Swedish, it is impossible (at least while sounding remotely natural) to say "grandmother" without specifying whether it's the maternal or paternal grandmother. The translator had to just guess, and ended up being wrong when more context was given in a later book.
    - JoeSmithson 6y ago
      I believe it's also the case that there is no word for "uncle" in Swedish. This makes more sense to me because your relationship to your mother's brother is actually meaningfully different to your mother's sister's husband.
- Semaphor 6y ago
  They seldom fail to make sense, but they sound unnatural 99% of the time.
- fergonco 6y ago
zimpenfish 6y ago
> you have to scramble for alternatives which inevitably lose subtle shades of meaning That would be "difficult to translate", then, not "untranslatable", no? As for breaking the flow of the text, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to do that anyway translating Russian to English.
- ivanbakel 6y ago
  >That would be "difficult to translate", then, not "untranslatable", no? Where would you draw the line? No culture has a concept which is literally unexplainable to any other. Translators could potentially give meaning-for-meaning accurate translations if it were desirable, or possible, to give each word a paragraph of qualifiers and contexts. But translators are restricted to at least trying to preserve the structure of the translated work, and for words that means trying to pick a one- or two-word substitute. Some words just don't have an accurate substitute. You can easily pick translations which are "not wrong", but none would be correct. What would you call those words, if not "untranslatable"?
- ajuc 6y ago
  Word puns are sometimes impossible to translate (at least without teaching the other person the part of language it depends on). Example: A Pole, a German and a Russian meet the devil. He locks each one of them in a cell, gives them two small marbles each and tells them they have a month to impress him with them, or he'll eat them otherwise. So he comes back after a month and sees that the German's cell is full of complicated mathematical formulas and one marble is perfectly balanced on top of the other. He nods his head and moves on to the Russian's cell to see him doing one-handed pushups while juggling the marbles with the other hand. The devil nods again and moves to the Pole's cell, only to see that he lost one marble and broke the other one. Is it funny? Because it's pretty good in Polish and I don't know how to translate it withotu longwinded explanation. The problem is that the word "zepsuć" used for "breaking the marble" means "to spoil" or "to make something nonfunctional without destroying it physically". In English "break" is overloaded and people assume other meaning. So the Pole in the joke managed to make the marble stop doing what marbles do without damaging it.
  - 6y ago
rgoulter 6y ago
Sure. But, I enjoy prozd's short sketch on "official subs vs fansubs" in this regard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIlo (It demonstrates translation where an 'official' one is lossy, but the fansub tries to be more faithful).

narag 6y ago

The article seems like a pretext to give some interesting appearance to very worn out cliches. Sobremesa means afternoon if you're not trying to be pedantic. If you are, it's after-lunch instead of after-noon.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
It doesn't just mean afternoon. It's not only a temporal noun, it's related to an activity. You wouldn't enter the office and wish your coworkers "buena sobremesa". Or if you did, they would probably understand that you are mocking them for being idle at work.
wenc 6y ago
'Sobremesa' in Portuguese means dessert. Literally it is sobre (over) + mesa (table).

ivanbakel 6y ago

>You'd think people would learn. Learn what? The link just goes into a long bit of semantics stemming from the author's personal dislike of how other people use "untranslatable" as a word. There's nothing to "learn" from it, because it's a nothingburger. Meanwhile, most if not all language teaching that goes on today still does treat translation as bijection. Students are constantly asked to remember "the word for X in language Y". While that might be a good-enough approximation, it also majorly encourages the idea that that's how translation itself works - so people might be forgiven trying to set the record straight by pointing out that many words are "untranslatable" that way.

signal11 6y ago
> the author's personal dislike of how other people use "untranslatable" as a word Language Log isn't a personal blog, it's a group blog run by some fairly distinguished linguists, and their[1] point about bijection is coherently argued and deserves consideration. > most if not all language teaching that goes on today still does treat translation as bijection I'm not convinced - beyond beginner-level one quickly realizes that translation is not one-to-one. Is there a citation for this? [1] 'Their' because "no word for X" is a running joke in LL: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1081 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1081
- ivanbakel 6y ago
  >I'm not convinced - beyond beginner-level one quickly realizes that translation is not one-to-one. You don't believe the vast majority of language teaching happens at the beginner level? I certainly do, and it would be most people's only first-hand exposure to any kind of translation.
  - signal11 6y ago
    I should clarify that by beginner-level I meant "alphabet book level". A for apple, B for balai, C for conejo, etc. At beginner level language teaching, beyond the first few lessons, you run into words that are difficult to translate bijectively, e.g. ser/estar while learning Spanish from English.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago

That view only makes sense if you view translation as purely an encoding process: "let's express in language B exactly the same meaning as in language A". Then sure, you can always do it (as far as I know) if you are willing to accept an unbounded encoding length. Even in a language from an isolated tribe who has never seen a train, you could painstakingly describe all the details of a plain. However, that seems to me like an over-reductionistic view of translation. Typically, in all except highly technical contexts, you don't only want to convey meaning, you want to keep at least a modicum of naturalness, the feeling that your translated sentence is something that a native speaker of language B might really say. With that in view, I think it makes sense to say that there are words that are untranslatable in practice. Meaning is not lost, naturalness is. For example, to say "facepalm" in Spanish you would have to say something like "I place my hand on my face in frustration". Does that convey the meaning? Sure. Has any Spanish speaker ever said it? I highly doubt it, except for the joke of trying to translate something that just doesn't lend itself to it.

kqr 6y ago
Right, but it feels like you're already moving the goalposts slightly. The word "facepalm" is rarely meant to convey the literal act of slapping the forehead, but rather to communicate the resigned frustration associated with it. Surely, also Spanish people have ways to express resigned frustration?
- Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
  I think it's quite frecuently meant to convey the literal act. If I search for the word in the news, I get lots of examples of it (this is just the first: https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-retweeted-clip-of-fauci-face-palming-behind-him-2020-3?IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-retweeted-...). Obviously, if you are using it in an internet forum you're probably not literally facepalming, just as if you use "lol" you're not laughing out loud, but even in these cases, I don't think that means that you can entirely decouple the word from the gesture. At least for me, when I read the word, what I imagine is someone facepalming. There are several other ways to express resigned frustration (a sigh, a shake of the head) but they are not the same even if they are ways of expressing the same.

paganel 6y ago

Nothing was "demolished", nothing can be "demolished" in this regard, as many of the people who speak and read two or more languages fluently will attest. For one thing, many of the swear words/expressions cannot be translated, not even by using more than one word/a few words, there are languages where one can fill entire books with swear-words/expressions (one of them is Romanian, which I speak natively, I've heard the same thing about Russian or Hungarian) and there are languages where swear words/expressions are a lot less diverse (English is the example I know best). Of course, one can try to naively translate the "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mamii tale!" into the English "I will insert my dick into your mother's dead people", but this naive translation doesn't (can't) catch the word inversion "băga-mi-aș" (from "mi-aș băga") which makes the whole action sound a lot more dynamic and direct in Romanian, plus the word "pula" has a lot more meanings and context in Romanian compared to the simpler uses of "dick" in English, and last but not least the Anglo world seems not to care about one's dead people as much as we Romanians do (and I think we're not the only ones), and as such mentioning some other person's dead close relatives in a derogatory way is seen at most as quaint (while "morții tăi!"/"your dead people!" in Romanian is oftentimes used as a swear expression all by itself, I know I use it frequently). And this before we get to all the diminutives/suffixes that can be added to any word that is part of a swear expression (and not only) in a language like Romanian, a feature that is absent from most of the English language. For example the mentioned above example can very be easily changed into: > "băga-mi-aș pula în morții mămițicii tale!" with the "mamii" to "mămățicii" change (basically from "your mother" to "your little mother", where "little" actually means "more loved"/closer to the person being addressed) giving the whole swear expression a new other, even more personal feeling.

rootbear 6y ago
My Hungarian friend has often complained about how poor English is in comparison to his native Hungarian as a language for swearing. From your example, I'd say Hungarian swearing is stylistically similar to Romanian. He also told me about his favorite untranslatable Hungarian word, "bezzeg", which has to be handled on a case-by-case basis when translating into English.
- horsawlarway 6y ago

aiilns 6y ago

While others have already written great replies arguing for untranslatability, I'll add my own views as well (as a trilingual, non-native English speaker). I think what's immediately wrong in your argument is equating untranslatability with exact one-word equivalent. Then instead of arguing against untranslatability, you argue that translation isn't just equating word for word. I agree with that. Most everyone I think agrees with that. What's missing from that view is that different cultures mean different ways of viewing and experiencing the world, which necessitates different ways of expressing oneself, that is, different words and expressions. Words and expressions carrying a "cultural weight" so to speak, containing deep meaningful connections with its people and their history. A talented person with excellent knowledge of two languages and great skill using at least one of them (being themselves an author, or a poet) can translate great works from the other language. And yet the resulting work may not be able to convey every nuance of the original. Try it if you speak another language and read both the translated version and the original of a great work of literature and you'll see what I mean.

lhorie 6y ago
> Try it if you speak another language and read both the translated version and the original of a great work of literature and you'll see what I mean. Agreed. There's an even simpler way to experience this: jokes and puns. Often times, they are untranslatable because their literal meaning is nonsensical and all of its expressiveness comes from timing/context, play on words and/or a local cultural references. By the time you've explained a joke, it has already lost its effect. There's a curious story among diplomatic translators where in a live diplomatic meeting, one of the parties blurted out a joke and the interpreter, attempting to accurately set the mood, translated it as "X just blurted out an untranslatable joke, please laugh heartily"!

CogitoCogito 6y ago

I don't even see why we need to bring multiple languages into the picture. Different people have (sometimes not so) subtle different understandings of the meanings of different words. By a similar notion of "untranslatability", I feel like similar arguments would basically mean that a single language is untranslatable between two native speakers.