Translation is closely related to creativity. Although many people think that it involves interlinguistic exchanges, where one unit of meaning that exactly corresponds to the unit of meaning expressed in the source language is selected in a target language, the truth is that translation is an exercise that often entails an enormous effort of reflection, deduction and creation to successfully reproduce what has been said in a first language into a second language.
This reality is what has historically marked the difference between passive translation and active translation. Passive translation consists of merely conveying the linguistic content of a subject matter in a direct way, whereas active translation would involve analyzing the text as a whole, considering it in the context of those who will receive it and re-expressing that same original content in a way that not only transmits the encoded information to its target audience, but which also evokes feelings that manage to elicit the same response as in the original audience.
This circumstance sometimes makes translation a task that is not quite so simple. In fact, translators often have to face the additional difficulty where a reality, which exists in the source culture, does not exist as such in the target culture, thus imposing a series of challenges when it comes to reflecting new concepts. This not only includes new realities per se, such as the famous example of the “seal of God” that aimed to help the Inuit people better understand Biblical texts, but it also applies to language-specific nuances, such as, for example, associations between words that sound similar, e.g.: tale and tail in English (cuento and cola, respectively, in Spanish) or se cayó and se calló (they fell down and they fell silent, respectively, in English). In this way, the translator cannot reproduce the same associations that exist in the source language in the target language, which leads us to the debate on the capacity of translation to truly and wholly translate each and every linguistic expression from one language into the target language.
This idea led to the concept of the untranslatable, which is understood to be those words that “do not have a translation coined in other languages” due to their idiomatic nature. In fact, in everyday life, words of this type are closely related to publications that collect “words that do not exist in other languages”. The truth is that we must be careful with this statement, since it seems far too strict for reality. Many of these words have equivalents in other languages; however, the languages that are taken as a reference are more semantically distant and, therefore, do not have such equivalents. For example, it has always been said that the word тоска (taska) in Russian has no equivalent that expresses this kind of nostalgia, longing without yearning or spiritual emptiness, but the fact is that Ukrainian has the word туга (tuja), which is used with the same meaning. Therefore, as we can see, “untranslatability” is a matter of linguistic perspective.
On the other hand, there is a variant of “untranslatability” that is framed within the context of professional language services, where there are words in many types of text that should not be translated. In fact, the same types of text may include information that must be translated in some contexts, but maintained as in the original in other contexts. In this case, the translator must be fully aware of the aim of these materials in order to make the right decisions, or be knowledgeable of several basic concepts.
At a basic level, yet one that is not obvious to all translators, it is necessary to keep in mind that proper names, such as company names, brands and street names should not be translated. This is because they are realities that are found in the real world and would cease to exist if translated. With regard to proper names, some of them can be translated based on their context, such as the names of countries and cities (provided they have a historically coined translation) and company positions, since there are companies that prefer to use international names, usually in English, and others that prefer to localize this type of information to their local equivalents to create closeness and increase understanding.
Another important aspect of untranslatable names is that people’s names can be translated, for example, when used generically to create illustrative personalities in digital creations, such as calling a boy Douglas and localizing him as Miguel. These are not direct translations, but they convey the effect found in the original.
Untranslatability is a key element of translation assignments, since there are concepts that clients need to keep in the original language in order to maintain textual functionality. The task of professional translators will be to detect these elements and come to an agreement with the client on how to approach their localization.
Image reference: https://tn.com.ar/salud/noticias/2022/07/10/consejos-para-frenar-la-autocritica-cuando-las-dudas-laborales-te-atormentan//
