Impossible translations: why we struggle to translate words when we don't experience the concept

Speakers of languages with such “evidentiality” systems can learn to speak languages — like English — without them. Yet native lan- guage habits turn out to be hard to break. One recent study showed speakers of some languages with evi- dentiality add words like “reportedly” or “seemingly” into their statements more often than native English speakers.

- MARK W. POST

Human languages may not be a prison their speakers cannot escape from. They may be more like comfortable houses one finds it difficult to leave. Although a word from another language can always be borrowed, its unique cultural meanings may always remain just a little bit out of reach.

If you are fluent in any language other than English, you have probably noticed that some things are impossible to translate exactly.

A Japanese designer marvelling at an object’s shibui (a sort of simple yet timelessly elegant beauty) may feel stymied by English’s lack of a precisely equivalent term.

Danish hygge refers to such a unique flavour of coziness that entire books seem to have been needed to explain it.

Portuguese speakers may struggle to convey their saudade, a mixture of yearning, wistfulness and melancholy. Speakers of Welsh will have an even harder time translating their hiraeth, which can carry a further sense of longing after one’s specifically Celtic culture and traditions.

Imprisoned by language

The words of different languages can divide and package their speakers’ thoughts and experiences differently, and provide support for the theory of “linguistic relativity”.

Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this theory derives in part from the American linguist Edward Sapir’s 1929 claim that languages function to “index” their speakers’ “network of cultural patterns”: if Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won't.

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