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Hundred percent. Language is nothing more than a "conveyance vehicle" to encode the physical phenomenon around us and our experiences of it. Unless you're a bel
by vunderba 3y ago
Hundred percent. Language is nothing more than a "conveyance vehicle" to encode the physical phenomenon around us and our experiences of it. Unless you're a believer in some kind of parallel to the largely outmoded Waldorf hypothesis, nature is nature regardless of who is experiencing it.
To declare something "untranslatable" is essentially to imply that a non-native speaker is incapable of understanding it no matter how much they study the language. It deals in "touchy feely unquantifiable nonsense".
Noticed that everyone in here who proclaims that some things are untranslatable have yet to provide actual concrete examples of them (SRC LANG, TGT LANG, SRC SENTENCE)
The fact that you can have legal documents translated from one language to another is all the proof you need that if you're a good enough translator, all languages are interchangeable. You might need a whole lot more words or a whole lot less words depending on the source and target language though.
- TillE 3y ago> actual concrete examples Here's an easy one: nearly any pun is literally impossible to translate while still being a pun. You can explain the pun by talking about the original language, but it can't be adequately translated.
- compiler-devel 3y agoA pun's "pun-ness" is like an "insider joke" for native speakers of the language, but the "pun-ness" of a pun doesn't transmit additional information about the ideas pointed at by the pun. Which is more important to the listener, the idea or the joke?