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There's no such thing as "untranslatable words", and every text which claims existence of one, immediately translates it. The linked story is no different, of c
by brokenkebaby 4y ago
There's no such thing as "untranslatable words", and every text which claims existence of one, immediately translates it. The linked story is no different, of course.
- crote 4y agoThe problem with translations is that they are not a 1:1 mapping. When you translate, you look for a word with a similar meaning. For some words there simply isn't a close-enough word in the target language to be meaningful. It is like trying to map integers to floats. You can get a close approximation, but a conversion doesn't always make sense.
- brokenkebaby 4y agoTranslation is not a process of mapping a word (language A) to a word (language B). Translation is by dictionary definition a process of expressing sense/meaning of text with a different language. If a Dutch word can be only exressed by a full page of text in English, it's just fine, it's still translation! The correct CS analogy is therefore not float to int conversion, but transpiling Pascal to ASM: the fact that one call in the former requires a bunch of assembler commands doesn't mean it's untranslatable.