Source — Wikipedia, "Untranslatability"
- Title: Untranslatability
- URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untranslatability
- Type: tertiary / encyclopedia article (unstable — content can change; treat as a pointer to the theorists and terms below, not as a final authority on them)
- Accessed: 2026-08-28
Extract
- Defines untranslatability as text or speech in one language for which no equivalent exists in another; such gaps are called lacunae or lexical gaps.
- States the denotation/connotation distinction as the article frames it: "denotation can virtually always be translated, given enough circumlocution, although connotation may be ineffable or inefficient to convey."
- Discusses Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida as the theoretical center of gravity in this article's framing of untranslatability. Derrida (per the article's gloss) argued there is "an excess of untranslatable meaning in literature" that resists reduction to a closed system, and read the Tower of Babel myth as encoding a simultaneous "need and impossibility of translation."
- Cites Brian James Baer for the claim that untranslatability functions rhetorically as proof of national distinctiveness, and quotes Alexandra Jaffe: "each language has its own 'genius', an 'essence' that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the 'soul' of its culture or people." This is the cultural-politics angle the mission names.
- Notes that translators routinely close lexical gaps with compensation procedures — borrowing, paraphrase, description — which the article takes as evidence that most contested "untranslatable" content is in fact transferable, just not word-for-word.
Gaps in this source (flagged, not filled here)
- No treatment of Jakobson, Catford, or Nida, or of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis by name, despite these being named in the project's mission as core to the "academic and philosophical tradition." A later ingest should go to primary or secondary sources on those specifically (Jakobson's "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," Catford's A Linguistic Theory of Translation, Nida's formal/dynamic equivalence).
- Wikipedia's own citation trail was not followed out to primary sources for the Benjamin/Derrida claims; treat the Derrida gloss here as secondhand until checked against "Des Tours de Babel" or a scholarly secondary source.