Writers who proclaim that English has no translation for word x from language y, only to provide a matter-of-fact translation in the very next clause/sentence always make me chuckle.
Or they provoke pedantic ire. Depends on how much sleep I've had. :p
It's the simple words. English doesn't have a translation for German Brot. The English word bread denotes something almost but not entirely unlike Brot.
It's a similar thing with animals, when people say humans are useless animals because we can't swim as well as dolphins or see as well as hawks, even though we swim better than hawks and see better than dolphins...
Eg German doesn't have a single word for English bread.
Have you ever had English bread? See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
Basically, the two words fray at the connotations. The denotation is the same.
Does "apple" in English truly equal "ringo" in Japanese? The context is similar, but the iconic implications and inferences are not an exact match. There is something uniquely American about "apple". Not "ringo", but "apple". Worth naming a company after even.
And that's just with a fruit. Can only imagine how asynonymous less concrete terms would be.
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[1] Oddly, I hear this a lot recently. Quick search brings up Theodore Sturgeon who I wouldn't mind attributing this to at all.
Perhaps you mean that 'apple' has a different meaning in the United States than, say, in Wales, because its web of implications looks different in one place than another. Following that thought, though, the same would be true of two American speakers, who surely have their own idiosyncratic webs. It's an interesting idea. But are words not 'synonyms' that have the same referent, only because two speakers have different relationships to that referent? Is a word partly its evocation? Or can we look at its evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning' it shares between speakers? (Surely it shares something, or language would lose its point.)
Incidentally, synonym is not the word to be nullifying here. A synonym is a like word, something that may equal the original but usually differs in degree, amount, tone, allusion, or other effect. Anyone using a thesaurus without a dictionary is sure to embarrass themselves sooner or later: differences in meaning between like words are common, and it is no revelation to say that one speaker will have different associations with a word than another, particularly if they come from different cultures.
Absolutely. Red and blue states. The east and west coast. Socioeconomic class. Gender, race, age, education. You and I.
But those are the differences. What we have in common also pertains. Almost everyone is American, exposed to the same media climate, and, most importantly, speaks English.
And that is why we communicate. We connect and overcome our differences using what we have in common to get things done.
"Apple" is only the tip of the iceberg. It will mean different things to different people. But what we share between us culturally is the American "apple" and the English "apple". If we compare that with the Japanese "ringo" and the Japanese word "ringo" there will be differences. To say "apple" = "ringo" is only equating symbols and mere entry points, to which not all else automatically follows.
> evocation separately from a stricter 'meaning'
There is evocation, and there is meaning, at all times. There is also context, and the intent of the speaker. There is even body language and tone. Even this is a simplification, but it is far more accurate than what they taught most of us at school, which is something like "language = grammar + vocabulary". This model does not translate mechanically even though theoretically it's suppose to. What we've now found is that what is missing is not technology or algorithms or processing power, but rather, most of the picture. That's why it still takes a good human translator to translate it all. Computers still cannot infer intent, transfer emotions, or cross cultural lines without embarrassing themselves.
(Thank you for a thoughtful and stimulating response.)
In written Mandarin, for example, there are only pictographic characters. Each single character translates to an English word or phrase, but which it translates to is completely arbitrary. It is extremely anglocentric to say "English doesn't have a word" for a given Chinese character, if in fact English has a phrase for it. The Chinese language has no obligation to translate each character succinctly into a single English word.
In fact, one of the greatest strengths of pictographic languages is the high degree of information density per character. More often than not, a pictograph will translate to an English phrase, not an English word. For native Chinese readers, inference comes naturally, as each character is built out of a set of "radicals," each representing a narrowly defined idea, that act as the primitive building blocks to convey a complex combination of their ideas within one "character."
It's the ideas that matter.
In modern written mandarin, each character corresponds to a spoken syllable, which roughly corresponds to a morpheme, although sometimes it seems that without the writing system to differentiate the vast number of homophones in the language, the morpheme-syllable correspondence would get murky very fast. Which is indeed a manifestly logographic element of the writing system
Isn't that still the case?
Take wabi sabi for instance. The fact that they have a word for that is not a coincidence, it's a byproduct of their culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBUTQkaSSTY.
Only a small percentage of Chinese characters are pictographs. Over 95% are compounds, with the first part suggesting the broad category of meaning and the second part suggesting the pronunciation.
> Each single character translates to an English word or phrase
Each single character represents one Mandarin syllable (with a very small number of exceptions, like 儿), which may or may not be its own word. Hence each character may or may not translate into an English word or phrase.
For example, the English word power translates both pouvier and puissance from French, an imbalance which forces translators into circumlocutions that I lack the patience to attempt to explain on my tablet [1]. Which is to say, they are decidedly not matter-of-fact.
Its the presence of these ordinary words that really are problematic to translate that feeds my reaction here. By singling out highly-specified words that are unlikely to exist but straightforward to express, the real heart of the translation issue is actually obscured. What's worse is that this misleading and cursory method of explanation has become a sin twice over by embedding itself as a worn-out pop-science cliche. By now you may have surmised that I didn't sleep too much last night.
Having got that off my chest, I will now stop soapboxing all over this really quite fascinating article.
[1] this distinction has been heavily discussed however, as it's important in the work of several famous theorists. a googling should yield explanations.