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Nothing absurd about it, because nobody said translation is easy (apart from some tech people who have been put in front of the problem for the first time). And yes, many of the good literary translations that I’ve read do provide part of the cultural context in the footnotes.

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From an epistemological point of view, the word "cat" is as untranslatable as the word "sobremesa". That's the absurd part that gets people in arguments on the internet.

In practice, we get by mostly fine (partly because, as you point out, we have footnotes).

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