[jveld]

> For instance, there is no English translation for the Japanese wabi-sabi—the idea of finding beauty in imperfection—or for the German waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the woods.

Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y, only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle.

Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on how much sleep I've had. :p

[eru]

It's never the complicated words.

It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.

[adrianN]

Wait, I'm German and I use bread whenever I mean Brot. What am I doing wrong?

[eru]

Compare Google image search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+brot vs https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!i+bread

Have you ever had English bread? See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process

Basically, the two words fray at the connotations. The denotation is the same.

[vacri]

The criticisms ring hollow when you have to use a bunch of different languages to show the supposed paucity of English. Does German have a wabi-sabi? Does Japanese have a waldeinsamkeit?

It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...

[eru]

Oh, it's not a criticism of English, just an observation about tranlation in general. English has a lot of interesting weird words, too.

Eg German doesn't have a single word for English bread.

[sp332]

It's not a criticism, it's just an observation.

[ju-st]

I have never heard the word "Waldeinsamkeit" before and I'm a German native speaker.

[coldcode]

Me too but in German you can make compound words out of anything. I mean Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften anyone?

[adrianN]

You should read up on Romanticism then, it's an important period in German history.

[unabst]

"There are no synonyms." [1]

Does "apple" in English truly equal "ringo" in Japanese? The context is similar, but the iconic implications and inferences are not an exact match. There is something uniquely American about "apple". Not "ringo", but "apple". Worth naming a company after even.

And that's just with a fruit. Can only imagine how asynonymous less concrete terms would be.

---

[1] Oddly, I hear this a lot recently. Quick search brings up Theodore Sturgeon who I wouldn't mind attributing this to at all.

[boken]

What is "uniquely American" about the word apple? Both the word and fruit come from elsewhere and still abound in those places: the word came into use in English over a thousand years ago, and the first apple tree to grow in the Americas would have been planted by a European settler some centuries later. There are cultural associations with apples in America, but do these attend to the word or the culture? And are they necessary for an understanding of the word 'apple' - whether by someone learning English as a second language, or as their first but in another part of the world?

Perhaps you mean that 'apple' has a different meaning in the United States than, say, in Wales, because its web of implications looks different in one place than another. Following that thought, though, the same would be true of two American speakers, who surely have their own idiosyncratic webs. It's an interesting idea. But are words not 'synonyms' that have the same referent, only because two speakers have different relationships to that referent? Is a word partly its evocation? Or can we look at its evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning' it shares between speakers? (Surely it shares something, or language would lose its point.)

Incidentally, synonym is not the word to be nullifying here. A synonym is a like word, something that may equal the original but usually differs in degree, amount, tone, allusion, or other effect. Anyone using a thesaurus without a dictionary is sure to embarrass themselves sooner or later: differences in meaning between like words are common, and it is no revelation to say that one speaker will have different associations with a word than another, particularly if they come from different cultures.

[unabst]

> true of two American speakers

Absolutely. Red and blue states. The east and west coast. Socioeconomic class. Gender, race, age, education. You and I.

But those are the differences. What we have in common also pertains. Almost everyone is American, exposed to the same media climate, and, most importantly, speaks English.

And that is why we communicate. We connect and overcome our differences using what we have in common to get things done.

"Apple" is only the tip of the iceberg. It will mean different things to different people. But what we share between us culturally is the American "apple" and the English "apple". If we compare that with the Japanese "ringo" and the Japanese word "ringo" there will be differences. To say "apple" = "ringo" is only equating symbols and mere entry points, to which not all else automatically follows.

> evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning'

There is evocation, and there is meaning, at all times. There is also context, and the intent of the speaker. There is even body language and tone. Even this is a simplification, but it is far more accurate than what they taught most of us at school, which is something like "language = grammar + vocabulary". This model does not translate mechanically even though theoretically it's suppose to. What we've now found is that what is missing is not technology or algorithms or processing power, but rather, most of the picture. That's why it still takes a good human translator to translate it all. Computers still cannot infer intent, transfer emotions, or cross cultural lines without embarrassing themselves.

(Thank you for a thoughtful and stimulating response.)

[dTal]

American ex-pat gone native in Wales. Can confirm "apple" means the same thing here.

[deciplex]

On the other hand, English has clear meanings for the words "blue" and "green", which Japanese can't seem to keep straight.

[jmcmichael]

word != phrase

[jveld]

I did confess the pedantry of my amusement-but-sometimes-irritation. I'll indulge myself to point out any substantive translation between two languages will involve expanding some words into phrases while some phrases may be condensed into words. The deeper irony of this way of presenting the issue is that it's usually ubiquitous and common words, which tend to have complex situational meanings that map very messily between languages.

For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.

Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.

Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.

[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.

[chatmasta]

There is no such thing as "word" and "phrase" distinction across languages. There are only ideas.

In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for it. The Chinese language has no obligation to translate each character succinctly into a single English word.

In fact, one of the greatest strengths of pictographic languages is the high degree of information density per character. More often than not, a pictograph will translate to an English phrase, not an English word. For native Chinese readers, inference comes naturally, as each character is built out of a set of "radicals," each representing a narrowly defined idea, that act as the primitive building blocks to convey a complex combination of their ideas within one "character."

It's the ideas that matter.

[jhedwards]

I hate to be pedantic because I totally agree with the idea you're articulating here, but it is misleading to describe Chinese characters as pictographic. The correct term is "logographic" because they are graphic structures that represent morphemes. There is a large variety of character types, some of which are pictographic but most are not. My favorites are characters that visually represent abstract ideas: 上 下 凹 凸 up down concave convex

[jveld]

I recently realized that the logographic misconception about Chinese writing probably stems from the pretty recent past when Classical Chinese was the sole written form, and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects. Of course, it's still not historically accurate to describe even Classical Chinese as purely "logographic" (for that matter, even Egyptian hieroglyphs have phonetic elements), but at least it explains the misconception somewhat

[jveld]

@jhedwards: My mistake - I guess I associated the term "logographic" with the idea that modern chinese characters represent "ideas," which is mostly false. My comment was aimed at the "pictographic" misconception, and was meant to agree with yours, which I evidently read too quickly.

In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system

[jhedwards]

Do you have a source for the logographic nature of written Chinese being a misconception? I understand that many people use Chinese characters phonetically to write their dialect, but when I did graduate work in Chinese the books and linguistics professors all referred to the writing system as logographic. Perhaps this is a new line of thinking I am just not up on.

[zardo]

>and thus certain characters represented a common meaning to speakers across dialects.

Isn't that still the case?

[gaur]

> there are only pictographic characters.

Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictographs. Over 95% are compounds, with the first part suggesting the broad category of meaning and the second part suggesting the pronunciation.

> Each single character translates to an English word or phrase

Each single character represents one Mandarin syllable (with a very small number of exceptions, like 儿), which may or may not be its own word. Hence each character may or may not translate into an English word or phrase.

[talles]

Coining a term for some idea tells you something about that language+culture, don't you agree?

Take wabi sabi for instance. The fact that they have a word for that is not a coincidence, it's a byproduct of their culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBUTQkaSSTY.

[pavanky]

While that may be true the difference becomes a lot smaller when you are talking about compound words and phrases.

[jon_richards]

There aren't translations for a lot of German words then...