Now, granted, there may not be technical vocabulary already developed in the target language, but if an idea can be conceptualized by anyone, and spoken about in a language, then there is, according to translation theoreticians, some way that that idea can be expressed in any language so that the target language hearers can get the same meaning or idea. She not only did all her research in Hawaiian, but had to develop names for the planet and express the distance of each planet from the sun, etc. She then spoken in fluent Hawaiian about her findings. She was eloquent. She also spoke, later, in English, and she was eloquent in English also.
Translation is just a process.
It takes ideas as expressed in one language and finds equivalent expressions using the natural lexicon, syntax, and discourse structures of a target language to state those same ideas. It simply deals with ideas that are already formulated and encoded in language. The concept itself isn't too difficult, altho, of course, it's not an easy one to accept, personally. But I struggled, very hard, to try to express the idea to the mother tongue translator so that it would be translated accurately in Cheyenne. Finally, toward the end of the hour, the translator's daughter walked in and I teased her saying we needed her help to express how to say in Cheyenne that troubles make us patient.