The Untranslatable and What It Teaches Us

The Encounter

Ella Frances Sanders' Lost in Translation is a small, illustrated book of untranslatable words from around the world. It's the kind of book you browse in a bookshop and buy as a gift. But it sent me down a rabbit hole about what untranslatability reveals about the limits of language and the shape of human experience.

Going Deeper

Words as Windows

The Japanese word komorebi — sunlight filtering through leaves. The Portuguese saudade — a melancholic longing for something you've lost or never had. The Yiddish luftmensch — an impractical dreamer, literally "air person."

Each untranslatable word points to an experience that an entire culture noticed and named, and that other cultures experience but don't have vocabulary for. This isn't just a linguistic curiosity. It suggests that language doesn't just describe reality — it carves it into pieces.

The Sapir-Whorf Question

The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — that language determines thought — has been largely abandoned by linguists. But the weak version — that language influences thought — keeps accumulating evidence.

Russian speakers, who have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy), are faster at distinguishing those colors than English speakers. The Pirahã people, whose language lacks number words beyond "few" and "many," struggle with exact quantity tasks. The Hopi conception of time, which doesn't separate past from present the way English does, produces genuinely different temporal reasoning.

What English Misses

English has no single word for the German Schadenfreude (pleasure at another's misfortune), and this absence is revealing. We experience Schadenfreude — of course we do — but we don't name it natively. Does the lack of a word make the experience slightly less accessible, slightly harder to recognize in ourselves?

I think so. Naming an experience is the first step to examining it. The unnamed lurks in the unconscious. When we borrowed Schadenfreude into English, we didn't just add a word — we added a category of self-awareness.

Connections

Ludwig Wittgenstein's famous proposition — "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" — is the philosophical foundation here. Wittgenstein wasn't being metaphorical. He meant that what you can think is bounded by what you can say. Untranslatable words are windows into worlds that exist just beyond your linguistic horizon.

George Steiner's After Babel takes this further: all communication is translation, even within a single language. When I say "love" and you hear "love," we're not necessarily talking about the same thing. The untranslatable just makes visible what's always true: language is an approximation, never a transmission.

Pushback

There's a tourist quality to books of untranslatable words. They present other languages as quaint museums of exotic feelings. The Danish hygge, for instance, has been so aggressively marketed to English speakers that it's become a brand rather than a concept. Translation fails, but commodification succeeds.

Also, "untranslatable" is itself a simplification. You can always translate — it just takes a paragraph instead of a word. What's really untranslatable is the cultural context that makes a word feel necessary.

What Remains

I've started collecting words from other languages that name experiences I recognize but can't articulate in English. My current favorite: the Finnish kalsarikännit — drinking alone at home in your underwear with no intention of going out. Not because I do this often, but because the fact that Finnish has a word for it makes me feel less alone in the universe.