I think in cases like this, “untranslatable” is really shorthand for, “cannot be translated without loss of information and/precision”. Of course words can be m

I think in cases like this, “untranslatable” is really shorthand for, “cannot be translated without loss of information and/precision”. Of course words can be massaged to produce a similar meaning, but conveyance of the entirety of the original meaning can be somewhere between difficult and impossible, particularly when one must be succinct and cannot use sprawling sentences to dial in the message. This is also why at its best, translation is a skill and an art. The same text can have significantly differing impacts readers depending on who’s translating.