how much really gets lost in translation?

A really interesting article in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik:
Word Magic - The New Yorker

With a nice little overview here:

Adam Gopnik gets it

May 23, 2014 @ 9:07 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Words words words

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Adam Gopnik, "Word Magic", The New Yorker 5/26/2014:

These questions, about the hidden traps of words and phrases, are the subject of what may be the weirdest book the twenty-first century has so far produced: “Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon,” a thirteen-hundred-page volume, originally edited in French by the French philologist Barbara Cassin but now published, by Princeton University Press, in a much altered English edition, overseen by the comp-lit luminaries Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. How weird is it? Let us count the ways. It is in part an anti-English protest, taking arms against the imperializing spread of our era’s, well, lingua franca—which has now been offered in English, so that everyone can understand it. The book’s presupposition is that there are significant, namable, untranslatable differences between tongues, so that, say, “history” in English, histoire in French, and Geschichtein German have very different boundaries that we need to grasp if we are to understand the texts in which the words occur. The editors, propelled by this belief, also believe it to be wrong. In each entry of the Dictionary, the differences are tracked, explained, and made perfectly clear in English, which rather undermines the premise that these terms are untranslatable, except in the dim sense that it sometimes takes a few words in one language to indicate a concept that is more succinctly embodied in one word in another.

The whole article is worth reading — subscribe to read it online, or buy that issue of the magazine. Gopnik also discusses John McWhorter's "The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language" (2014).

And for more of the same, you could check out our "No word for X" archive…

The title of the French version is Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. There's some discussion in the French-language Wikipedia here.

Language Log » Adam Gopnik gets it
Adam Gopnik, Word Magic, The New Yorker: entirely out of context but so good :) | Veooz 360

Some other extracts and ideas from the article:

'spiritual' and 'spirituel' (French)
'know-how' and 'savoir faire'
'longing' and 'dor' (Romanian) and 'Weltschmertz' (German)
'drive' and 'Trieb' (German)
'liberal' (English and French)

'The Making of the English Working Class' (note the '-ing' form) would be translated
into French as 'The Formation of the English Working Class'

“Some pretty good equivalencies are always available. . . . If there were a perfect equivalence from language to language, the result would not be translation; it would be a replica. . . . The constant recourse to the metaphor of loss in translation is finally too easy.” 
Word Magic - The New Yorker
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