Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables

The book

Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, edited by Barbara Cassin, published in English by Princeton University Press in 2014. It is a translation and adaptation of the original French Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, first published in 2004 after an eleven-year editorial project. The published work gathers roughly 150 contributing philosophers and scholars across about 400 entries. Source

Scope, per the review consulted: philosophical terms that resist clean cross-language translation, centered on Greek, Latin, German, and French philosophical traditions, with the reviewer noting some entries extending to other European languages including Russian and Portuguese — though which specific Portuguese term(s) is not stated in the source used here, and should not be assumed to include saudade (see the saudade page) without checking the dictionary's own entry list directly. Source

Cassin's definition — load-bearing for this whole project

This is the single most important academic-tradition claim ingested so far, because it reframes what "untranslatable" means for the entire mission: an untranslatable, in Cassin's own usage, is explicitly not a word that cannot be translated at all. As quoted by the reviewer, 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." Source

Under this definition, the entries in Cassin's dictionary are words that get translated differently by different translators, in different eras, never quite settling — not words that defeat translation outright. This is a materially different sense of "untranslatable" from the popular-phenomenon sense examined in the topic page on the popular phenomenon, where the implicit claim is closer to "no English word or phrase captures this at all." The project should keep these two senses of the word "untranslatable" explicitly distinct whenever it compares academic and popular claims — collapsing them would misrepresent both traditions.

Critical reception (one review)

Lucie Mercier's review identifies a tension between Cassin's own stated ambition — decentering Eurocentrism in the practice of philosophy — and the dictionary's actual center of gravity, which the review says stays Franco-German-English despite the stated ambition. Mercier also notes the English-language edition adds sections not in the original French structure (gender studies, postcolonial theory), which she argues blur the original project's boundaries. Despite these reservations, Mercier calls the work valuable "slow science" and an indispensable reference. Source

Caveat: this page currently rests on a single review. The review's own publication date could not be confirmed from the page fetched (see the caveat logged on its source page); a second review is queued to corroborate or complicate this account (candidates surfaced by the same search: Michael Kinnucan's review in Asymptote, and a review on SAGE Journals — neither fetched yet).

See also

• Lexical gaps and untranslatability — the linguistics-side account of untranslatability, for contrast with Cassin's philosophical-tradition sense of the term.
• The untranslatable-words phenomenon