1. The claim

The genre has a characteristic opening move. A 2010 web article that this project came to treat as one of the genre’s founding documents begins: “HERE ARE A FEW instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless.” Twenty words follow — among them Portuguese saudade, Czech litost, German Schadenfreude, Japanese wabi-sabi, Arabic ya’aburnee — each with a one-line gloss and the implication that the gloss is somehow not enough. Anyone who reads English online has met the form: the listicle of untranslatable words, the illustrated gift book, the social-media card with a foreign word in an elegant typeface and a wistful definition beneath it. The words are lovely. The claim attached to them is the subject of this essay.

What does it mean to say a word is untranslatable? The phrase hides at least three different claims, and the popular genre slides between them without noticing.

• There is no single English word for it. Linguists call this a lexical gap: the concept exists, and English speakers can talk about it, but no one English word does the job that one word does in the source language. This claim is often true and not very interesting on its own: every language has thousands of such gaps relative to every other (English has no everyday single word for the day after tomorrow; German has übermorgen).
• English cannot express it at all. This is a much stronger claim: not merely that the word lacks a one-word equivalent, but that no phrase, sentence, or paragraph of English can convey what the word conveys. Almost nothing the project examined survives in this form. The standard rejoinder, stated plainly in the reference literature the project began from, is that translators close lexical gaps constantly — by borrowing, paraphrasing, or glossing — and what is lost is economy and connotation, not content (lexical gaps and untranslatability).
• English speakers cannot have the feeling. The strongest claim of all, and the one the genre most often gestures at: that because your language has no word for it, the experience itself is closed to you. This is the “strong” form of what is loosely called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis — that language determines what can be thought. In the test case the project’s reading covered, color vocabulary, the strong form is treated as refuted: speakers of languages with fewer basic color terms still see the same distinctions. A weaker form, that language nudges habitual attention, is the one the project’s source allows to survive, and it licenses far less than the genre wants.

The academic study of translation supplies a sharper version of the first point, and it cuts both ways. Roman Jakobson argued in 1959 that there is no full equivalence between any two words across languages: his own example was that English cheese is not identical to Russian syr, because the Russian word does not cover cottage cheese (Jakobson, Catford, and Nida). If that is the standard, then every word is untranslatable and the label singles out nothing. Jakobson did not conclude that translation is impossible; he concluded that translation is a matter of managed mismatch. J. C. Catford, cataloguing the “shifts” a translator makes when two grammars fail to line up, and Eugene Nida, distinguishing fidelity to a source’s form from fidelity to its effect on a reader, were likewise describing how the mismatch is handled, not whether it can be. The field’s later “cultural turn,” usually dated to 1990, moved the question again: not can this be translated, but who decided to translate it this way, and whose interests the choice served (the cultural turn). That last question turns out to matter a great deal for the words in this essay.

There is, finally, a fourth sense of “untranslatable,” and it belongs to a book whose title the popular genre has quietly borrowed. Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables — published in French in 2004 and in English in 2014, with some 150 contributors and about 400 entries — is a dictionary of philosophical terms that never settle into a single translation; the publisher’s own examples are German Dasein, Russian pravda, Italian stato — and Portuguese saudade. Cassin’s untranslatable is explicitly not a word that defeats translation. In the formulation the project recorded from a review of the book, it is the sign of “the way in which, from one language to another, neither the words nor the conceptual networks can simply be superimposed” (Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables). An untranslatable, in that sense, is a word that keeps being translated, differently each time. The dictionary’s own scope, per its publisher, is “more than a dozen languages,” every one it names being European, with dedicated essays for eight of them; none of the project’s non-European words could be expected to appear in it, and the project never managed to check its index directly for any word at all — so that saudade, named in the publisher’s copy, is the one word of the twenty-five with documented standing there. The distinction, though, was load-bearing from the project’s first day: the academic tradition and the popular genre use the same word to mean nearly opposite things, and any essay that lets them blur misrepresents both.

So the project’s question was never “are these words untranslatable?” — under the strict standard the answer is yes for every word in every language, and under the strong standard it is no for nearly all of them. The question was what the popular claim amounts to when a particular celebrated word is examined. For each word, that meant asking the same things: What does the word mean at home, according to its own language’s dictionaries? Where did it come from? Has English adopted it? How have published translators actually rendered it, when they met it in a real text? When and through what channel did it enter the English-language genre? And who, if anyone, benefits from its being called untranslatable? The rest of this essay reports what those questions turned up, for twenty-five words, in the order that seems most useful: first the genre itself, then the words, then translators, dictionaries, and politics, and finally what all of it seems to add up to.