Talk:Untranslatability

message: The name of this article is not helpful in making and keeping it tidy, since "untranslatability" is a matter of gradation, and there is no definable boundary between "hard to translate" and "impossible to translate", something that might be pointed out in the opening paragraphs.
I think that the article should start with an overview (with examples) of the kinds of problems before going into the possible solutions. There are many more kinds of problems than just a lacuna, as shown in later examples. "Translating poetry" and "Translating puns" could be two subsections.
I don't understand the section heading "Theory". This does not seem more theoretical than any of the rest. If there is any "theoretical" section, it should deal with the theory of what can be considered a translation, which could be a concise rendering of Translation#Measuring success in translation. This would be useful as a reference for the merits of various translation devices.
Then the ground has been laid for a section discussing solutions, approaches, devices, tricks. This should also be illustrated with examples; the Hofstadter book has plenty of examples. I don't think we need a separate section on Specific examples. LambiamTalk 22:31, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Structure of this article 

message: Not sure if this should count or not, because the word itself is easy to translate, i.e. a home trailer that is twice as wide as a normal home trailer.  However, unless you are American living in particular areas, you'll never be able to explain the strange paradoxical pride-vs-shame "king amongst beggars" connotations that go along with it.
:I hear you. If you have sources reliable for wikipedia about the topic, "Double-wide" might be an interesting article. `'mikkanarxi 02:21, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Double-Wide" 

message: The czech word "Litost" which has been described in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting should be considered too.
:Apparently no one has any objections, so go ahead and add the word to the article. You didn't explain what this word means, so this information by itself does not help much. (Patrick 22:46, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Litost 

message: If we have to moderate the Today list with so many caveats, why don't we just delete it? It's not very useful.
: I agree --Grstain 12:37, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lousy List 

message: I think this article should be called, "untranslability into english", as it doesn't represent anyh other kind of untranslability between other pairs of languages, just whatever -> english.
: I think that the problem arises from the examples and the addition of the Today list (see previous comment). By eliminating these, and concentrating "untranslatability", the article will recover its focus. Other articles, "Untranslatibility into English", "... into French", "... into German", etc. could be created if someone so desired. --Grstain 12:37, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The examples in the Today list, as well as the other examples in the article are examples of "untranslatability" which obviously occur in translation to English; please bear in mind that the article is written in English! By definition, therefore, examples must also be in English, the "Today List" is no exception, "lousy" or not. In addition, many examples of translation into English illustrate important translation concepts that also apply to translations between languages other than English. If you would like to make the article more universal, you may add examples of translation between other languages, but keep in mind that you must provide an explanation in English, and even if you do so, your example(s) would not have the same impact. To make the article more universal, I would suggest adding examples that apply to different dialects of English such as British English, Australian English, Canadian English, etc., and possibly even examples of translation difficulties between them. -- (Patrick 22:44, 11 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Title of the article

message: I've added a reference to Asterix in this section, and will follow up with specific examples. Could anyone else think of good examples of pun translation/substitution?
I've had particular problems with this very conundrum while translating a French detective novel written in slang!Rhinoracer 14:51, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Puns

message: To my knowledge "I have X" is expressed by "Xim var" which would be translated as "my X exists". Am I wrong here or is this a mistranslation in the article?
:you are absolutely right. "X'im var" is the translation for "I have X" 213.31.11.80 (talk) 11:59, 10 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: "X is to me" in Turkish

message: I would have thought that Hebrew word davka is up there among the most difficult words to translate.
* Is this any good as a description: http://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/davka ? 81.2.72.162 (talk) 00:28, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  What about Davka? 

message: I've removed the templte castigating this article for innapropriate prose style. Rhinoracer 10:13, 2 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Template removed 

message: Why on earth is this list still doing the rounds? Does Wikipedia aspire to be a serious scholarly resource or not? Please read this debunking of that list by someone who knows what they are talking about. 86.136.92.2 12:34, 7 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I have. — Grstain | Talk 16:23, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Nonsensical 'Today Translations' list

message: "[..] both a son of a sibling and a son of an uncle are called neef" is correct, but "[..] it does not have different terms for nephew and cousin" is not: the words kozijn for cousin and oomzegger for nephew can be used. Also, the article states that this is a translation problem with Romance languages, but Dutch is a Germanic language.
:I did not know about kozijn, but I came independently to the same conclusion regarding oomzegger, but both kozijn and oomzegger are unusual and I do not think you will hear it in the North of the Netherlands. (I dunno about Belgium and South Netherlands)Andries (talk) 00:53, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cousin in Dutch 

message: I've added the "unreferenced" tag to this article. Right now the article has page after page of unreferenced material, much of which looks downright silly to trained linguists, and large swaths which are probably original research.
:I have added a pair of citations/references to the poetry/puns section. The Bearded One (talk) 02:58, 8 July 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I support this proposal. - JasonAQuest (talk) 13:59, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  References 

message: This article in The Economist suggests (at the very end) that the word "accountability" is particularly difficult to translate into other languages -- or at least the Spanish, French, Russian, and Hebrew, Arabic, and Portuguese in which the author claims knowledge. --FOo (talk) 08:37, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I am native speaker of Russian and I can assure you that there is Russian word for "accountability". "Accountability" translates to Russian as "подотчётность" (pod-ot-chyot-nost'). Netrat_msk (talk) 13:43, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

text: I am native speaker of Hebrew and I can assure you that there is a Hebrew word for "accountability". "Accountability" is translated into Hebrew as "אחריות" (ax-ra-yoot. Read the "x" as the Russian x). HOOTmag (talk) 20:07, 10 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Untranslatable from English? 

message: I believe this article should mention  English word that came from African American community such as "hustle", "flow" and "groove".
The concept of "flow" was not fimiliar to most cultures before the rise of new-school hip-hop in US, thus no other language may have a proper translation for it. 
The same is true for words like "sushi". Netrat_msk (talk) 13:54, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Hustle and flow are examples of jargon.  Any time a group invents or appropriates words to express something meaningful to them, that jargon is going to require explanation to people outside that group.  That's not really a translation issue, because it applies even to communicating with people who speak the same langauge. -JasonAQuest (talk) 13:59, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ebonics English 

message: QUOTING the article:  
"Similarly, when Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay adapted Gogol's play Revizor (The Government Inspector), as Le gars de Québec, he transposed the setting from Russia to his home province."
Fine, but what has this information to do with the subject of the article, which is things that are untranslatable?
Wanderer57 (talk) 01:36, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gogol 

message: Good evening,
I noticed that in the "Paraphrase" section, when the author of the article mentions the word "Ilunga", he/she says that it's "a word supposedly from a language in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.". I found the use of "supposedly" a little strange, because it is referenced that "Ilunga" is a word from the Tshiluba language. So, I suggest that it should be rephrased as "a word from the Tshiluba language in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.", or just "a word from a language in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.", without the "supposedly". ----Sanscrit1234 (talk) 00:00, 26 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ilunga 

message: I think this example should inform that a visual character of the policemen was lost when their names were adapted. The last letter of their names indicates who they are. Dupont has a twisted moustache while Dupond has a straight moustache: T for tordue and D for droite. I really wonder which one is Thompson and which one is Thomson? -- Silwilhith (talk) 22:59, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you certain that's not a back-formation, concerning the explanation? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:07, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Dupont and Dupond

message: Translating "it is very probable that..." is easy. "The very idea of ... is ..." would need a clarification like "just the idea of ... is already..." ("alleen het idee al ... is ...") which is awkward, too long and not strong enough, or a shorter description that would include the German word "überhaupt" because Dutch has no proper word for that either. Joepnl (talk) 04:03, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Hasn't "überhaupt" been loaned into Dutch, anyway? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:08, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: That depends on the definition of loaning I think. Most people know the word, but it still has the ü which is not a Dutch character. It is listed in the authoritative Van Dale dictionary, but the Dutch Language Union advises to use it sparingly and contrasts it to "Dutch alternatives". Joepnl (talk) 20:27, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translating "very" to Dutch 

message: The last version of the ex-article "Words Hardest to Translate"  contains substantial content not adequately carried over to this article. In particular, commentators on Talk:Words hardest to translate argued for the deletion of an interesting list on the basis that it was "dangerously close to advertising". I submit that while it may have been an imperfect list, it presented materially interesting content and was cited. Its removal in favor of nothing at all has not improved the quality of Wikipedia. --Peter Farago (talk) 02:28, 8 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merge from "Words Hardest to Translate"

message: =myth,'dbe i/articl----pl.note:i'vRSI>typin=v.v.hard4me!>contactme thruMSNpl.if unclear[sven70=alias (talk) 12:25, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  bibl]/kuran/rel.txts=ofn claimd intr-bl 

message: This article is overflowing with unnecessary examples.  If left to grow, nothing will check it, as most languages have countless words that cannot be translated into another; even if we focus only on "untraslatable into English," we're still dealing with such a wide set of info that the list will grow without bound.  Furthermore, as others have pointed out in the past, this article is almost entirely uncited.  For all the average reader knows, these words are entirely fictional, and/or they are entirely translatable, but it's just that the editors themselves didn't know how to do the translation.  Are there enough regular editors here to come to some sort of consensus about how to go about trimming this section down?  It seems to me that the family section is the biggest offender...but others may have thoughts about doing more substantive re-organizing...Qwyrxian (talk) 04:17, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too many examples 

message: In the current version of the article, at Untranslatability#Compensation, we read 
Compensation is a translation procedure whereby the translator solves the problem of aspects of the source text that cannot take the same form in the target language by replacing these aspects with other elements or forms in the source text.
Should the final phrase not read
...with other elements or forms in the target text? --gråb whåt you cån (talk) 23:14, 8 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  source/target text 

message: It says names like Eve, when translated into English, make little sense in English. I think this is wrong. Even though Eve originally meant "life", it would still make sense in English (through folk etymology) as "the mother of all the living" because she is before all else. She is the Eve to the living, like how Christmas Eve is to Christmas.
Also, though these aren't in this article, there are some other biblical verses that make sense in English through folk etymology: "woman" as "from man", "Babel" as "Babble", etc.
96.4.9.71 (talk) 13:03, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Names in the Bible? 

message: "In [...]German[...] there are different words for the person indicated by "mother's brother", "father's brother" and "parent's sister's husband", all of which would be uncle in English." 
What word(s) are thought of here?
As German I only know the one word "Onkel" for all three situations.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.253.217.178 (talk) 18:51, 12 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with the OP. There are words like "Oheim" (mother's brother) and "Muhme" (mother's sister), but they are archaic and never used in everyday speech.--2.245.238.91 (talk) 18:15, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

text: Further support for removal of German from this list of such language is the German Wikipedia, which lists "Oheim" as "archaic" (veraltet).  Perhaps German could be mentioned as a language where there used to be such, but it is no longer such. Cyberherbalist (talk) 19:58, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text:  I am also Germany and I also wondered about this. I fixed this part and mentioned that these words are not used any more. --MartinThoma (talk) 13:02, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Aunts and Uncles in German? 

message: There is a  template containing several templates listing various areas for improving the article.  Each of these is supposed to reference its own Talk page section, but up till now, has not done so, afaict.  This is an attempt to remedy that.  With the exception of the OR and  templates which I added, I can't mind-read what each editor's intent or justification may have been for placing the templates. 
So long as there is no consensus about a resolution of a problem named in a subsection below, the corresponding hatnote in the  template should remain on the article page.   Each subsection below is intended to be completely independent, and so there's some duplication of wording. This is so that someone coming to one of the sections from a link doesn't have to look all over for an explanation.  Please comment on an individual issues by appending your comment to one of the sections below (and don't forget to add four tildes after your entry to apply your signature). Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multiple issues 

message: According to Template:Essay-like, this means that the article "is written like a personal reflection or opinion essay". (It does not mean that it's written like an "essay" in the sense of a school essay or research paper.)
Pros and cons
The article is full of unsubstantiated, personal opinion, including just about everything in the #Examples section.  For specific cases, search on page for 'difficult to translate' for example.  Says who? Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Essay-like

message: Template:Cleanup says that this article "may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards".  The template has a reason param  but the user who placed the template didn't provide a reason.
Pros and cons
With no reason given, it's hard to read their mind.  As it is, it's too vague.  I would say, that if no editor comes along with a justification for why the "Cleanup" template should remain at the top of the page, we should delete it after a decent interval; say, three months? Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Cleanup

message: Template:Refimprove says that the "article needs additional citations for verification."  The user who placed it did not provide a reason param, or give a talk section name.
Pros and cons
Painfully obvious why this banner is needed.  This article needs to comply with verifiability like any other; at a minimum, every example needs a citation by a reliable source. Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Refimprove

message: Template:Original research says that the article "possibly contains original research" but doesn't explain further in the template doc, because there is extensive information about OR elsewhere.   No original research is a major part of verifiability which is one of the core principles of Wikipedia.  The reason param given says, "Whole article, examples and procedures, seems like OR".
Pros and cons
Almost the whole article seems like Original research. Specific examples do not have reliable sources attached, and much of it looks like it was pulled out of a hat; both the #Examples, as well as the #Translation procedures section.
The talk section #References above from 2010 alludes to possible OR, and some of the comment there may be relevant to take into consideration. Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Original research

message: Template:Unclear is a redirect to Template:Confusing, and says that the article "may be confusing or unclear to readers."  A reason param is available but was not used.
Pros and cons
It's unclear to me what the editor who placed this template found unclear or confusing.  As it is, it's too vague.  I would say, that if no editor comes along with a justification for why the "Cleanup" template should remain at the top of the page, we should delete it after a decent interval; say, three months? Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Unclear

message: Template:Unfocused says that an article "may lack focus or may be about more than one topic".  The reason param says that "Content in Translation procedures section would fit better at Translation or elsewhere."
Pros and cons
The whole #Translation procedures section has some good content (unfortunately unreferenced, and may also be OR, but that's already covered above) however this article isn't about Translation procedures.  The content of the article should stick to material that is relevant to the article title.  This material about how to translate might be welcome at the article Translation or perhaps Translation studies, or one of the articles listed at :Template:Translation sidebar, but it's not relevant here.  Mathglot (talk) 03:05, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Unfocused

message: Removed this section. There have been complaints about this section not having any references going back to 2007, and it still doesn't. That's long enough. Verifiability is a core concept at Wikipedia, we can't simply ignore it.  Probably some good content could be written and sourced properly, and that would be fine, although it might be more appropriate as part of a different article than this one. Mathglot (talk) 01:30, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translation procedures