Technically, these word aren't translatable. They are definable, but we don't have a word in English that fully encapsulates the word as it does in the other language, right?
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.
Very valid points—especially that a word in one language may have an "identical" translated word but still miss out on a lot of cultural or underlying meaning. I guess a better headline word be "Whimsical illustrations depict the meaning of words that we don't have words for in English."
There's so many nuances between synonyms in English alone, bringing another language with its own cultural history can really throw things for a loop.Very valid points—especially that a word in one language may have an "identical" translated word but still miss out on a lot of cultural or underlying meaning.
I'd argue this doesn't apply for compound words; the only reason they seem 'untranslatable' is that English doesn't compound words as easily as other languages (German etc.) And, perhaps more clearly, it doesn't apply for l'appel duvide, which literally translates to "the call of the void." That's a pretty perfect translation, if you ask me.