Questions: The Untranslatable: Language, Culture, and Meaning

Question 1

A translator is working on Shakespeare's puns, which depend on English words that happen to sound alike. The target language has no equivalent homophones. A domesticating approach would most likely:

• A. Add a footnote explaining the original pun and leave the target text unchanged
• B. Invent new wordplay using homophones that exist in the target language, even though it changes what words are involved
• C. Transliterate the English words to preserve the original sounds
• D. Omit the pun entirely and note its absence in a translator's preface

Answer: (B)

A domesticating approach prioritizes fluency and naturalness in the target language — making the text read as if it were originally written in that language. For an untranslatable structural feature like a pun, domestication means finding a different structural feature (new wordplay) that produces a similar effect for target-language readers, even if it involves entirely different words. Footnotes (option A) and explicit announcements of untranslatability (option D) are foreignizing strategies — they preserve the strangeness and remind the reader they are reading a translation.

Question 2

The Portuguese word *saudade* has no single-word equivalent in English. This is an example of which type of untranslatability?

• A. Structural untranslatability — the word's grammar has no equivalent
• B. Allusive untranslatability — it refers to events specific to Portuguese history
• C. Lexical untranslatability — the concept it names has no equivalent word in the target language
• D. Phonetic untranslatability — the word sounds unlike anything in English

Answer: (C)

*Saudade* is a lexical untranslatable: it names a concept or emotional state — a particular kind of wistful longing — that Portuguese culture has carved out with a specific word that English has not. The word itself is grammatically straightforward; the problem is semantic, not syntactic. This differs from structural untranslatables (like meter, rhyme, or puns, which depend on the sound system or grammar of the source language) and allusive untranslatables (which depend on knowledge of specific historical events or texts).

Question 3

Recognizing and attending to untranslatability can sharpen comparative literary analysis by revealing what is most language-specific about a text's effects.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is the productive conclusion the topic draws from untranslatability. Rather than being a pessimistic finding, untranslatability identifies precisely where a text's effects are most bound to its original language — which is often where the most culturally specific and literarily interesting features live. By asking 'what cannot be carried across?' comparative readers gain insight into what each language uniquely enables. Far from foreclosing cross-cultural understanding, the concept opens a more rigorous form of it.

Question 4

A fluent, domesticating translation that resolves most untranslatable elements through equivalent target-language features fully preserves the literary effects of the source text.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

A domesticating translation prioritizes target-language fluency and may produce an equally compelling read, but it does so by substituting new features for source-language features, not by preserving them. A new pun in German substituted for a different English pun creates a different joke, even if it creates a similar effect. The cultural specificity, the etymological resonance, or the particular allusion of the original is replaced, not preserved. Domestication makes the text feel native at the cost of what made it foreign — a genuine trade-off, not a solution.

Question 5

What is the difference between lexical and structural untranslatability, and why does each require a different kind of response from the translator?

Model answer: Lexical untranslatability arises when the source language has a word naming a concept that the target language has no equivalent for (e.g., *saudade*, *Schadenfreude*). The translator's options include borrowing the word into the target language, paraphrase, or explanatory expansion. Structural untranslatability arises when a text exploits features of the source language's form — sound patterns, grammar, accidental homophony — that do not exist in the target language (e.g., Shakespeare's puns, quantitative meter in Arabic poetry). Here the translator cannot paraphrase or borrow; they must either acknowledge the loss through foreignization or compensate with a structurally different feature in the target language.

The distinction matters because the two types of untranslatability identify different sites of cultural specificity. Lexical untranslatables reveal that languages have carved up conceptual or emotional space differently — the gap is semantic. Structural untranslatables reveal that a text's formal effects are tied to its language's acoustic and grammatical system — the gap is formal. Different translator strategies (borrowing, footnotes, compensation, omission) are appropriate to each, and choosing wrong risks either erasing or misrepresenting the source text's distinctiveness.