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Are Some Languages Impossible to Translate?

Why even alien languages can be deciphered, if we’re clever enough

Dustin Arand
E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower

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Image credit: Felix Nagel (Wikimedia Commons)

Back when I lived in China, one of my favorite things to do was look out for funny mistranslations. The real estate sector was a particularly hilarious offender. Once, from the back of a taxi, I spotted a billboard advertising a new condominium development.

“Incredible imposing manner of large,” it proudly announced.

At first, I thought the disconnect was owing to the way Chinese relies so much on proverbs and idioms. It’s a beautiful and poetic language that often packs a whole lot of meaning in just a few words. You generally can’t translate Chinese into English word for word. You have to understand that you’re translating meanings, not words, and to do that you need to take a whole lot of cultural context into account.

Musings like these may have been what Ludwig Wittgenstein had in mind when he wrote that “if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” For Wittgenstein, the real lifeblood of language was not a logic that could be reduced to formal mathematical axioms, but a complex and messy “form of life” that could only be truly understood by immersing oneself in it.

I’ll concede that neither I nor anyone else is likely to be immersing ourselves in…

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