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UntranslatabilityUntranslatability is a property of a text, or of any utterance, in one language, for which no equivalent text or utterance can be found in another language.
OverviewContrary to popular belief, words are not either translatable or untranslatable. There are only words, and these words are more or less hard to translate depending on their nature and the translator's skills. Quite often, a text or utterance that is considered to be "untranslatable" is actually a lacuna, or lexical gap, that is to say that there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A translator, however, can resort to a number of translation procedures to compensate. Available translation proceduresThe translation procedures that are available in cases of lacunae, or lexical gaps, include the following: AdaptationAn adaptation, also known as a free translation, is a translation procedure whereby the translator replaces a social, or cultural, reality in the source text with a corresponding reality in the target text; this new reality would be more usual to the audience of the target text. For example, in the Belgian comic book The Adventures of Tintin, Tintin's trusty canine sidekick Milou, is translated as Snowy, in English; likewise the detectives Dupond and Dupont become Thomson and Thompson in English, Schultze and Schulze in German, Hernández and Fernández in Spanish and 杜本 and 杜朋 (Dùběn and Dùpéng) in Chinese — the Spanish and Chinese examples not being quite so faithful translations since the pronunciation of the two names is different, and not just the spelling. Similarly, when Quebec playwright Michel Tremblay adapted Gogol's play Revizor (The Inspector General), as Le gars de Québec, he transposed the setting from Russia to his home province. Adaptation is often used when translating poetry, works of theatre and advertising. BorrowingBorrowing is a translation procedure whereby the translator uses a word or expression from the source text in the target text holus-bolus. Borrowings are normally printed in italics if they are not considered to have been naturalized in the target languages. See Loanword CalqueCalque is a translation procedure whereby a translator translates an expression (or, occasionally, a word) literally into the target language, translating the elements of the expression word for word. CompensationCompensation 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. For example, many languages have two forms of the second person pronoun — an informal form and a formal form (the French tu and vous, the Spanish tú and Usted, the German du and Sie, to name but three), while most modern-day dialects of English no longer recognize the T-V distinction, and have retained the you form only. Hence, to translate a text from one of these languages to English, the translator may have to compensate by using a first name or nickname, or by using syntactic phrasing that are viewed as informal in English (I'm, you're, gonna, dontcha, etc.) ParaphraseParaphrase, sometimes called periphrasis, is a translation procedure whereby the translator replaces a word in the source text by a group of words or an expression in the target texts. An extreme example of paraphrase can be found in the BBC [1] reports of June 22 2004 of the identification of the 'most untranslatable' word. The word chosen is Ilunga, a word supposedly from a language in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The BBC article states that "Ilunga means 'a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time'." Here, the report proves that this word is not in fact untranslatable, as it provides an English translation by way of the periphrasis. (Incidentally, the word Ilunga is of questionable provenance, as some Congolese claim that it is simply a name and without additional connotations. See the article Ilunga for more information.) Translator's noteA translator's note is a note (usually a footnote or an endnote) added by the translator to the target text to provide additional information pertaining to the limits of the translation, the cultural background or any other explanations. Some translation exams allow or demand such notes. Despite this, resorting to notes is normally seen as a failure by many translation professionals. Untranslatability in poetry and punsThe two areas which most nearly approach total untranslatability are poetry and puns; poetry is difficult to translate because of its reliance on the sounds and rhythms of the source language; puns, and other similar semantic wordplay, because of how tightly they are tied to the original language. That being said, many of the translation procedures discussed here can be used in these cases. For example, the translator can compensate for an "untranslatable" pun in one part of a text by adding a new pun in another part of the translated text. See alsoExternal links |
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