[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.