1135: The Myth of Untranslatable Words Jan 17, 2018

When people refer to ‘untranslatable words’ they usually mean a word that does not have a direct translation into a given language, in this case English. A crucial distinction, however, is that the ideas are translatable, even if there is not a single word that can replace it, as with the misconception that Eskimo's have more words for snow. If that were the case, one would have to learn whole languages to understand things, and moreover, if a foreign language has these so-called untranslatable words (which any will surely have), logically it would not be possible to learn a second language at all. These words are translatable. Indeed, there are whole books, card-series, and more—such as the image below—that one can find when searching for untranslatable words, but all of them come with little, translated, definitions. Otherwise, these books would just be filled with foreign words, and people would have to take it on the author’s authority that they mean anything to anyone.

If you also think that, while maybe the general concept is understandable, there is a certain je ne sais qua that only native speakers know, consider that this is true of dialects of English. Though not a perfect analogy, to an American, ‘jam’ and ‘jelly’ would both be called ‘jam’ to a British English speaker, who must differentiate by saying like ‘smooth jam’ as a retronym. Support Word Facts on Patreon for new things and to help make the content better: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.