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Quatrarius · 3450 days ago · link · · parent · post: Whimsical illustrations depict the meaning of untranslatable words
A translation doesn't need to be one-to-one. If you can change the words into another language and keep the meaning, even if it's a long sentence, it's translatable. When somebody talks about things as being "only partially translatable", they don't mean that it's untranslatable, they mean that it's got connotations like any word that are hard to explain. Definitions like these are easy to explain. It's like reading the definition for translation, just in picture form. Any one-to-one word shared by two languages with the same surface meaning might not "fully encapsulate" the meaning in one or the other.