Against "untranslatable": what those word lists actually show

You have seen the lists. A Danish word for cosy contentment. A Japanese word for sunlight filtering through leaves. A Portuguese word for a particular kind of longing. Each presented as evidence that speakers of that language perceive something the rest of us cannot.

The lists are enjoyable and the framing is mostly wrong, in a way that is worth unpacking because the actual phenomenon is more interesting.

What "untranslatable" usually means

In nearly every case, the concept translates perfectly well. What does not translate is the compression.

English can describe sunlight filtering through leaves. It takes five words rather than one. The claim that English speakers cannot perceive dappled light is obviously false — we have a word for dappled.

So the observation is not about perception. It is about which concepts a language has found frequent or salient enough to package into a single lexical item. That is a genuine and interesting fact about a culture, and it is a much smaller claim than the one usually made.

The frequency argument

Languages tend to develop short words for things their speakers talk about often. This is a well-documented pattern — common concepts get compressed, rare ones get described.

So a language with a single word for a specific social obligation is telling you that the obligation comes up a lot. A language with detailed vocabulary for a type of snow, or a stage of rice cultivation, or a kinship relationship, is telling you about what its speakers spend their time doing and thinking about.

That is genuinely informative. It is ethnography rather than metaphysics.

The claim that goes too far

The strong version — that language determines thought, and that speakers of a language without a word for something cannot conceive of it — has a long and contested history in linguistics. The strong form is not supported. People routinely think about things they lack single words for, learn new distinctions, and borrow words when they need them.

Weaker versions have more support. There is reasonable evidence that language can influence attention and categorisation in measurable ways — colour boundaries, spatial reference frames, how events are described — with effects that are real and modest rather than worldview-defining.

The distinction matters because the strong version is frequently deployed to make cultures sound mysterious and inaccessible, which is both inaccurate and, in a subtle way, condescending.

English is full of these too

Worth noting, because the lists are almost never in the other direction.

English has words that require paraphrase in many other languages. Terms from specific technical, legal and commercial domains. Words that bundle a concept and an attitude together in ways that translators find awkward.

Any language, examined by a speaker of another, produces a list like this. English tends not to appear on the lists because the lists are written in English, for English speakers, and the point is to make other languages seem exotic.

Where translation actually gets hard

The genuine difficulties are less photogenic.

Grammatical categories that one language marks obligatorily and another does not. Some languages require you to specify how you know something — whether you witnessed it, inferred it, or were told. Translating into a language without that marking means either losing the information or adding a clause that was not emphasised in the original.

Register and formality systems. Languages with elaborate honorifics encode social relationships in every sentence. English can indicate formality, less systematically and with far less granularity.

Words carrying historical weight. Terms tied to a specific history, whose connotations cannot be transferred because the history was not shared.

Poetry, where sound and meaning are inseparable, and where the translator has to decide which to sacrifice.

These are the real problems, and translators write about them at length. None of them fit on an illustrated list.

What to do with the lists

Enjoy them, and read them as vocabulary rather than as revelation.

A word that packages a specific idea neatly is worth learning, and English borrows enthusiastically — a substantial part of its vocabulary arrived exactly this way, because a useful compression is a useful compression regardless of where it came from.

What is not worth doing is treating the word as a keyhole into an otherwise inaccessible consciousness. The people who use it are describing an experience you have also had. They just have a shorter way of saying it.