Thanks for that thoughtful reply, I like the way you put it.

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.

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.

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.

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

Very well put. There’s always a way to translate it.

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!

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?