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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that the article calls these words "untranslatable" but then proceeds to translate them. Yes, there are no single words in English that have the exact meanings of the single words in Japanese, but "untranslatable" gives the impression of not being able to convey the meaning in English even with multiple words--but that's exactly what the article does.

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The thing with "untranslatable" words is that their perfectly translatable, but the connotations surrounding them are completely different. What untranslatable then means in this context is that the listener of the translated version will /not/ understand the same meaning as someone listening to the non-translated version.

For instance, while the literal translation of shouganai is "it can't be helped," I'll translate it as "shit happens" in one situation, or "that's bureaucracy for you" (among other things) in another, depending on context. There simply isn't a reliable equivalent.

Also, imagine a scene (one that occurs every day at the end of my restaurant shift) where everyone is saying "otsukare" to each other. How should I translate that? Should I just have people yelling "TIRED" to the room? I'd have translated the word 'correctly' but not actually reflected the general feeling of "wow, we did it bro. Good job"

I'm currently learning Japanese. As I've learned these 'untranslatable words' of course I learned them through dictionaries and English explanations. As I saw them used and used them myself, though, they came to mean something different. I had to develop a new concept to compile them to, as it were. Now I find them difficult to translate back to English, and instead they have become new words in my vocabulary. It's why pigeon languages happen. (you should see the English spoken in the English-speaking office I worked at. It's stolen many Japanese words)

'It's stolen many Japanese words'. That's the beauty of English and partly the cause of its universal success: it appropriates or invents as necessary. Moreover it doesn't have a committee deciding which words are acceptable.

Well, it does, but nobody listens!

If only there were a single word that could convey "difficult to translate without using more than one word", alas the closest we have is "untranslatable".

I think it's a useful warning signal that any attempted translation is provisional, has limited scope and can't be relied on. A less absolute word or phrase might give the impression that a straightforward translation is possible, but 'untranslatable' is a stark warning.

Furthermore, what is a single word anyway? Many alphabet based languages make this easy with spaces, but the multiple characters of Chinese and kana make it easy to stack things without ever using a space to break it into distinct parts. So of course Japanese is capable of generating really long and therefore unique "words".

Same with German. But even there, there are connotations surrounding those compound words that are lost in translation to English.

They might have failed miserably at translating these words

Except that the very first paragraph makes it clear that the author means "doesn't have a single-word translation".

Of course, not all of these are single words in Japanese, either—"mononoaware" is usually given as 3: "mono no aware".

I think 8note means that, unless one speaks Japanese, the multi-word translations given in the article might be incorrect and we wouldn't know any better.

I understand that. But we shouldn't think that's more likely to be true here than any other article translating Japanese because the phrases easily satisfy the author's definition of "untranslatable", and there's not really a reason to think that these terms are actually beyond the ability to translate given the ability to use many words.

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