4 ms·
Just because a word doesn't have a 1-to-1 correlation with a word in another language doesn't mean it's not translatable; in fact, this website shows that they
by wunderlust 5y ago
Just because a word doesn't have a 1-to-1 correlation with a word in another language doesn't mean it's not translatable; in fact, this website shows that they are translatable. Even more, it's not analytically true that any word in one language shares a perfect mapping with a word in another language. This is evident when you translate a word into another language and back into the native language and find yourself with a different (albeit perhaps related) word.
W.V.O. Quine made some remarkable points about translation [1], although not all philosophers (cf. John Searle) agree that the scenarios he suggested are as problematic as he contended.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation
- qqii 5y agoHaving seen the English translations for my native tongue a lot of these translations are only surface level and quite lossy. Even if the mapping between languages is surjective, certain ideas and phrases are difficult to translate whilst maintaining the succinctness of dialogue and are practically difficult to translate. Considering translatability as a spectrum obviously "does not translate" is a hyperbole, and shouldn't be taken literally at face value. Hopefully you'd agree that most words on this list are at least on the difficult end of the spectrum.