Why does it need to be translated into a single English word? This is the power of "preserving language as reference": I can look up the meaning and cultural co

Why does it need to be translated into a single English word? This is the power of "preserving language as reference": I can look up the meaning and cultural context of "namaste," gain that information, and then I can use the word "namaste" as a loanword if there's not a suitable short word in English that conveys the same idea. That's how loanwords happen. Words aren't these indivisible blocks that exist in the universe outside of us. When we first learn what, for example, a "fish" is, we don't do a lookup in a mental dictionary for the brain-word that means "fish." We learn that whole paragraph about how fish are animals that swim in water and have gills and fins, etc. Then we come up with a name for that swimmy-water-animal-thing, and move on. If a foreign word or concept is not sufficiently similar to anything readily available in a language, that language grabs the foreign word as a loanword and moves on. That's what languages do. This means it's valuable to have this as a reference, but perpetual storage -- redundancies and all -- in the brains of generation after generation seems inefficient and burdensome to the brains who actually have to expend effort to store it and also compete in a global society. If they want to, more power to them, but I don't know if that's the best mandated investment of resources/time.