Impossible translations: why we struggle to translate words when we don’t experience the concept

If you are fluent in any language other than English, you have probably noticed that some things are impossible to translate exactly.

A Japanese designer marvelling at an object’s shibui (a sort of simple yet timelessly elegant beauty) may feel stymied by English’s lack of a precisely equivalent term.

Danish hygge refers to such a unique flavour of coziness that entire books seem to have been needed to explain it.

Portuguese speakers may struggle to convey their saudade, a mixture of yearning, wistfulness and melancholy. Speakers of Welsh will have an even harder time translating their hiraeth, which can carry a further sense of longing after one’s specifically Celtic culture and traditions.

Imprisoned by language

The words of different languages can divide and package their speakers’ thoughts and experiences differently, and provide support for the theory of “linguistic relativity”.

Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, this theory derives in part from the American linguist Edward Sapir’s 1929 claim that languages function to “index” their speakers’ “network of cultural patterns”: if Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won’t.

Welsh hiraeth can imply a longing after specifically Celtic culture and traditions.
Mitchell Orr/Unsplash

Yet Sapir also went a step further, claiming language users “do not live in the objective world alone […] but are very much at the mercy” of their languages.

This stronger theory of “linguistic determinism” implies English speakers may be imprisoned by our language. In this, we actually cannot experience hygge – or at least, not in the same way that a Danish person might. The missing word implies a missing concept: an empty gap in our world of experience.

Competing theories

Few theories have proven as controversial. Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf famously claimed in 1940 that the Hopi language’s lack of verb tenses (past, present, future) indicated its speakers have a different “psychic experience” of time and the universe than Western physicists.

This was countered by a later study devoting nearly 400 pages to the language of time in Hopi, which included concepts such as “today”, “January” and – yes – discussions of actions happening in the present, past and future.

Even heard of “50 Inuit words for snow?” Whorf again.

Although the number he actually claimed was closer to seven, this was later said to be both too many and too few. (It depends on how you define a “word”.)

Do in the Inuit really have 50 words for snow?
UC Berkeley, Department of Geography

More recently, the anthropological linguist Dan Everett claimed the Amazonian Pirahã language lacks “recursion”,

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