Source — Pullum, "Translating the untranslatable"
- Title: Translating the untranslatable
- Author: Geoffrey K. Pullum
- Publication: Language Log (University of Pennsylvania)
- Date: 2010-10-28
- URL: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2741
- Type: secondary / academic-linguistic commentary, explicitly skeptical of the genre it discusses
- Accessed: 2026-08-29
Extract
- A working linguist's contemporaneous critique of Jason Wire's Matador Network list (
matadornetwork-wire-2010-untranslatable-words.md), written three weeks after that list was published — direct evidence the genre drew real-time academic pushback almost as soon as it appeared on the web, not only in later retrospectives (cf. Luu 2016). - Core argument, quoted: reacting to a claimed-untranslatable item, Pullum writes "Does French jeune fille fail to translate English girl...? What kind of madness is this?" — his objection is that the lists conflate "untranslatable" (defeats translation outright) with merely "lacking a one-word target-language equivalent," the same distinction this project's own
lexical-gaps-and-untranslatability.mdconcept page already draws. - Notes, with qualified approval, that Wire's list is "reasonably well-curated" compared to others of the type even while its central "untranslatability" framing is, in Pullum's word, "self-evidently untrue" — i.e., even a sympathetic-ish reading from inside the field rejects the genre's central rhetorical claim.
- A comment on the post (attributed by this project's search process to Ben Zimmer) references a 2005 Language Log post, "Tingo and other lingo," said to state that several examples circulating in these lists derive from Adam Jacot de Boinod's The Meaning of Tingo (2005), which in turn "cribbed from previous compendia" — i.e., a claim that the genre's example-words recycle across sources rather than being freshly researched each time.
Gaps
- The Zimmer-2005-post claim above was surfaced only through this project's tool chain (a WebFetch summary of the Pullum post's comment thread), not by directly reading the 2005 post itself — a direct URL for "Tingo and other lingo" was searched for and not found. Do not cite the recycling claim, or the 2005 date, as independently confirmed — it is a lead, not yet a filed fact, consistent with this project's standing caution about tool-synthesized text (see
wiki/log.mdsession 10 andthemillions-broida-2015-book-of-disquiet-saudade.md's Gaps section for the same caution applied to WebSearch). - Full comment thread not read in full; only the portion relevant to the Zimmer reference was extracted.