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comment by Quatrarius
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.





insomniasexx  ·  3450 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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."

user-inactivated  ·  3449 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    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.

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.