Is it really un-translatable?
The yndigo blog has an interesting post about "untranslatables" — when a word in one language has no good equivalent translation into another. One of the commenters also pointed out a German word that he believed couldn't be captured in English satisfactorily.
The idea that certain words simply can't be translated into another language seems to be on translators' minds a lot. It's also a common theme over at the transubstantiation blog.
I agree that certain words may be difficult or impossible to translate into equivalent words in another language — if you stick to the level of the words. I find that if I can get away from the words and see the message, very few thoughts are so unique that someone hasn't found a way to express them in the target language. Of course, figuring out how to express the source concept naturally in the target is the hard part, and at the same time keeps our jobs safe from the machines (for now).
When things do get hairy is when something about the original text relies on the words (or their structure) themselves. One particularly vexatious example from Japanese is when the author goes on about the kanji used to write a word. Another, more difficult problem is poetry and other artistic uses of language.
But for your run-of-the-mill concept, I think there's very little that can't be translated very accurately. Sure, you might miss that single word to capture a nice one-word concept in the source language. But honestly, nobody's going to miss it except the fellow bilinguals looking over your shoulder — and they're not usually your target audience. If we don't say it that way in the target language, obviously nobody's going to miss it when you use a write-around.
I'm probably going to invite a bunch of flames here, but I think that translators between European languages tend to focus on the words slightly more than my Japanese-English colleagues. The reason is simple: a nearer to word-for-word approach goes a lot farther when you're translating between European languages. Between Japanese and English, a focus on the words starts giving ridiculous results a lot sooner.
Truth in advertising: I used to know German a lot better than I do now, but I never knew it well enough to translate it. I do, however, speak Spanish well, and have translated it professionally since before I learned Japanese (although not so much any more).
Keep the translation posts coming!
Zak
http://transubstantiation.wordpress.com/
Hi Ryan,
I have to take issue with the idea that “few thoughts are so unique that someone hasn’t found a way to express them in the target language”, at least in the case of the Japanese-English language pair. There are quite a few Japanese concepts that are simply not expressible at all in English. Take for example “seken”, a word which an entire book has been written about. That’s an extreme example I know, but there are many other words and expressions whose subtleties are similarly beyond the scope of a single English sentence.
@Chris
Yet people around the world and through time have the same motivations, needs, and desires. People want other people to think well of them. They worry about what other people think.
My contention that as long as you’re not translating a treatise on the meaning of the word seken, you can figure out what the author meant, and put it in a way that an English author would have written it.
I wrote a similar post some time ago. Plenty of people out there (and I agree this trend feels stronger among multilinguals whose tongues are closely related) who confuse “no single word encapsulates this” with “this can’t be translated.”
Good post!
How about “enryo no katamari”? I guess you could say, “leftovers caused by everyone being too polite to eat the last piece”.
I think most of the alleged untranslatables have a wordy definition in the dictionaries of the source language, too.
The words I hate the most, though, are the English words used in Japanese that can almost never be translated back to English with the same word. Words like ポイント and バランス are used in so many ways that are not used in English.
@Philip
Certainly the words you mention are tough to translate; some because they have no pat translation to English, and you have to think hard about the context every time. But “hard to translate” doesn’t mean “untranslatable,” right?
Some words have a cultural feeling or emotion behind it. It would be impossible to translate it with 100% accuracy unless you explain them the hidden meanings and, in essence, change the way a reader thinks. (Which probably isn’t the translators’ job) Unless, of course, they are translating “a treatise on the meaning of the word”.
In J->E translation, I learned that there’s no such thing as 100% accurate, anyway. We can get 20 people to translate the same sentence and get 20 different results.
Thought of another one! Shibui when used to refer clothes or objects. But, now that I think about it, it could be translated “old-fashioned yet stylish”.
Your blog is really cool. I started J->E translation about 4 months ago – a lot of your advice really helped me out.
Thanks a lot!
There is a solution to any problem: an “untranslatable” concept needs merely some time and creative problem-solving to find its translation. A mentor once pointed out that it’s just as useful to translate one word as multiple words as it is to translate multiple words by one. Just as valid is that a concept will be translated in as many different ways as it has translators–and this is not a bad thing. So maybe an “untranslatable” would find its solution in lots of words, or when translated by multiple people, but some solution can always be found.
@Masked Translator
Very well put. There’s always a way to translate it.
Looked at from an extreme point of view, all words are untranslatable.
Each language has its own grammar: the way words mean differs from one language to another. Japanese ‘whiteness’ is not English ‘white.’ Meanwhile, each language is shaped by different historical accidents and cultural habits. But words convey thoughts, they are not the thoughts themselves. Translators do not convert codes, they interpret and reproduce thoughts. In other words, translators deal with concepts represented by words and combinations of words.
Once you shift the focus from the word to the concept, the problem becomes clearer. Concepts are tools of thought. At the least abstract level, words as concepts are referents, they classify directions, locations, actions, and things in the world. Even then they are always at one remove from what they refer to. “The concept ‘dog’ does not bark.”
Both pug and saluki can be recognized by most humans as dogs, and we can probably find equivalent words in all languages with the same import as ‘dog’ the indicator of the canine species of organism. The cultural associations of the concept ‘dog’ are going to vary, however, in different languages and different cultural groups. To Shakespeare, dogs were not faithful friends or worthy of warm sentiment. In a more contemporary context, if someone says, “My dogs are tired,” the meaning in Manhattan and the Yukon are likely to be different. Whether or not you can find, when translating to French, Russian, Thai, or Japanese, a simple culturally equivalent expression for ‘tired feet’ is down to knowledge, ingenuity, and great deal of fortuitousness.
Concepts are tools. Tools are used for a purpose: usually for making, sometimes for destruction. In translation it is well to always keep in mind the main purpose of the text you are translation. By effectively getting the ideas across, a successful translation will fulfill that purpose. If something is difficult to translate, considering the purpose of the translation, you have to wonder how necessary it is to render it accurately. Finding a succinct equivalent may not be possible, especially with a deadline pressing, and a circumlocution may distract from the purpose. What you do in each instance is just part of the stress in the workaday life of the translator. Not finding a satisfying solution is a daily irritation and you always think that there must be a better way. It’s not so much a case of being untranslatable as being unsatisfyingly translated: an insult to our intellectual vanity. Dissatisfactions dog us.
@Anteater
If you want to get really extreme, we can’t even communicate within the same language, since we all have different associations with each word (as your Yukon vs. Manhattan example suggests). But we seem to get along in practice
Just to qualify my first comment, I wasn’t referring to “translating a treatise on the meaning of the word seken”, but to translating the word *seken* itself. And that’s the whole point: even in Japanese, a whole book is required to get at the meaning of the term, so obviously in English we’d need as much or more (probably much more).
My point is not to get into an endless debate about what is translatable or not translatable, but just to make the case that languages are not equivalent, or even roughly equivalent in many cases. And that IMHO is a great thing: I’m all for difference, it’s what makes life interesting.
Although I understand the spirit of the statement (and maybe I’m just taking this too literally), I don’t really agree that “people around the world and through time have the same motivations, needs, and desires”. The amazing thing to me is that there are these differences in the way that we see the world, in what we want and need. That to me is one of the things that makes translation so challenging and so interesting.
@Chris
I took your comment as being about translating the word seken (世間). The point I failed to make is that while you can’t pin down seken with a single one or even multi-word gloss, you can find a way to translate it in a given context.
You won’t capture all the historical and cultural connotations of the original, but IMHO that’s not what translators are after. Our job is to translate the effect of the original, not the cultural/historical connotations. (Of course it’s more complicated than that.)
That’s the purview of linguists and anthropologists, and the “translations” they use are often full of all kinds of footnotes that attempt to convey the cultural/linguistic information lacking in the gloss language.
Ryan.
Perhaps I should have signalled that I don’t really agree with reducing the issue to the absurdity of impossibility. Borges already dealt with this kind of issue when he wrote about making a map that corresponds exactly in size to the country. All our human communication is representation.
I assume that when people speak, they refer to some kind of reality that is apprehended universally* in more or less the same way. That is why we can generally agree cross-culturally that a dog is not a cat, and a cat is not a rat. And that is why there are more difficulties the further we get from referential language: more culture is included in the text.
*assuming here that differences in the brains of individuals
are more or less evenly distributed across local gene pools.
Technical texts usually concern description or instruction. Usually that is also their main purpose. Marketing materials are produced to sell goods and the conventions for appealing to customers vary locally. There can also be a huge difference in the skill of the writers of the source materials. If the purpose is mainly referential, you can work out something serviceable if the writing is poor. Translating poorly written marketing or corporate PR materials, and keeping as close to the source as customers demand, is much more frustrating if you actually care about the quality and effectiveness of the English. This is one area where the ‘cultural content’ (and deficiencies) of the source can be a real problem.
Philip:
How about “enryo no katamari”? I guess you could say, “leftovers caused by everyone being too polite to eat the last piece”.
“The last leftover pieces in the serving dishes that no-one was rude enough to finish off.” Not as succinct as the Japanese, but it conveys the sense.
Chris.
And a note on Seken…
I haven’t read that book, but I did read Amae no Kouzou.
It struck me as an ideological tract, a bit like someone making a virtue of neurosis. I haven’t yet discovered the gloss in a J-E dictionary, but in English *amae* is recognized as indulgence
OED
1. a. To treat (a person) with such favour, kindness, or complaisance as he has no claim to, but desires or likes; to gratify by compliance, or by absence of restraint or strictness; to humour by yielding to the wishes of.
If a person ‘does *amae*’ in English, the expression,
“just trying it on” comes to mind. The person trying it on may _always_ be indulged and become what we would call a spoiled brat…
OED (at brat)
1808 Scott Mem. in Lockhart i. (1842) 8/1,
I felt the change from being a single indulged brat, to becoming a member of a large family, very severely.
And famously from A Streetcar Named Desire
I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.
In other words, *amae* is not a uniquely Japanese trait that other cultures cannot understand. Interpersonal politics just
make it more allowable in Japan, partly because relationships tend to be more role based.
Getting back to Seken the book: You can imagine a politician or ideologue in American or Europe also writing a book on society or the people or the public and claiming that the ______ish or _______an or _____ch conception is unique. Many words just can’t be defined, yet all but the most curmudgeonly will agree that a word like, say, ‘love’ does refer to something. Books like Seken are part of an ongoing cultural debate about how our nebulous social-relationship-dependent concepts should be applied to guide personal conduct and social policy.
Mrs Thatcher once famously quoted a sociologist who held that “Society does not exist.” I would say that our equivalent words for *seken* are also probably good candidates for book length disquisitions.
It is well to know which can the Shynola is in.
Ryan,
Thanks for that thoughtful reply, I like the way you put it.