Untranslatable words and speculative fiction
Happy New Year from Berlin! Really sneaking in the January newsletter under the wire… I started one on a different topic but then I decided it was too much like morphology class, so I had to come up with a different topic.
News
No new publications or anything to announce. The current draft of my book broke 30k the other day, so I feel good about that.
Friend-promo
My friend Steen Comer wrote the booklet for this rune deck with cool-looking watercolor art that's currently on Kickstarter. If it sounds interesting, do take a look!
Untranslatable words
People love the idea of untranslatable words, that other languages have concepts that English doesn’t have words for, which is often followed by “how beautiful” or “how quaint.” Every few years or so, listicles of “untranslatable words” pop up. My quick duckduckgo for the term turned up a variety of them, including “203 Most Beautiful Untranslatable Words,” “Beautiful untranslatable words from around the world,” and even dictionary.com (who ought to know better) has a list of 15 of them.
The problem is that they are translatable; they just don’t have a simple one-to-one equivalent in English. Explaining what hygge means takes a sentence or two (it’s a Danish word that means something to the effect of experiencing coziness together with loved ones, and it was really popular around 2016.) But if you go to the dictionary for pretty much any word, you get anything from a short phrase to several lines of text to define it, so it’s not really that different.
Using “untranslatable” as shorthand for “you need a sentence to explain it” is, from my perspective as an occasional translator, frustrating, because you don’t just look words up in a bilingual dictionary and do a quick swap. There are a lot of times where you’re faced with multiple options, and you have to pick the right one. Sometimes it’s a different sense of the word; sometimes it’s a different register.
Look-up-and-swap is how machine translation, like Google Translate or DeepL, works, by the bye. It’s more sophisticated than early efforts from 15 years ago, because the algorithm can associate context now more than it used to, but it’s not perfect, and in many cases it’s not even good. This belief, that translation is just swapping words one for one, is part of the reason that AI bros are pushing their machine translation tools and publications are firing their translators (to replace with machine translation).
Machine translation can be helpful to make news articles, for example, accessible to others, but it isn’t a substitute for human expertise.
Translation and cultural context
It’s true that some things need more explanation than others because a reader doesn’t have the cultural background for something. It’s also true that I don’t have the cultural background to get all the jokes in Shakespeare’s plays without annotations.
Translation is a balance of many things, one of which is how much to expect the reader to know already. Back in the early 2000s, I was really into anime and manga, and I remember the flame wars over subtitles vs dubs, whether fansubs were more accurate than official subs, the “dubtitles” (where the dialogue replacement script was used for the subtitle track), whether to “flop” manga so it could be read left to right, and a whole lot more. I remember people being outraged about Tanaka-sensei being translated as Mrs. Tanaka (because sensei means teacher, and you have to preserve the original Japanese culture, not water it down for Americans) or about leaving off the -kuns and -sans (informal and formal terms of address, respectively) for the same reason.
I also remember a lot of early 2000s manga keeping Tanaka-kun and footnoting it, and occasionally footnoting or endnoting cultural references (like “this is a famous book”).
So yes, when there is a different cultural context, the translator’s job may be a little more difficult, but we don’t shrug our shoulders and say it’s untranslatable. (In the piece that’s coming out in summer 2025, I footnoted a word that had a double meaning in German that I couldn’t encapsulate in a single English word.)
Just borrow it
Languages have a really great solution to so-called untranslatable words: borrow them. We’ve been doing it for millennia. (There is evidence in modern Finnish and Estonian of borrowing from a proto-Germanic language!) Speakers encounter an item or concept that is new to them, and the other language has a word for it already, so they take the word that conveniently already exists. You see this in English especially in food words (coffee, tea, chocolate, taco, sushi, pizza, mango, paneer makhani, bok choy …) but also in textiles (khaki, damask, Jacquard), philosophy (Weltanschauung, zeitgeist), and general culture (poltergeist, angst, Schadenfreude). Many scientific terms were invented from Greek and Latin roots, which is a special kind of borrowing. (The first known use of the word biology was in 1799!)
Relating it to writing
Speculative fiction often includes made-up words. Readers are accustomed to it and figure out the meaning from context, like plasteel is clearly a portmanteau of plastic and steel, or wait for the author to explain it, if it doesn’t have an easily parsed meaning, like ansible. Take CJ Cherryh’s oeuvre as an example. I’ve read her Foreigner books the most recently (and written more extensively about them elsewhere), so I’ll pick those.
The people who live on the planet that the humans colonize call themselves the atevi (pl; singular ateva). That’s what the humans call them, too. The beast that serves a horse-like function is a mecheita; it’s more lizard-like than a horse, so it’s a mecheita. The atevi have an emotion that doesn’t map onto human emotions, which is called man’chi, which is something like loyalty and something like a herding instinct but is nothing like friendship or love. This biological and psychological difference is one of the main sources of tension between humans and atevi in the 22-book (so far) series. It’s always referred to as man’chi in the books.
When to make up words; when to just use regular English
When I was starting to write, I started making up a conlang for my novel and it was so important to show off my conlang that I just had to use my made-up words in the opening text. Made-up words for regular Earth things. This project has been abandoned for more than a dozen years now, but I still cringe when I think about how I reacted to the feedback that I should just use English. It was important to the setting! It showed that it wasn’t regular Earth!
Looking back, yeah, I should absolutely just use English, especially on page 1. Call the mild hallucinogen “sees-gods leaves” rather than the meaningless syllables I made up for the language. That does the same thing, and it’s in language that a reader who didn’t go learn my conlang can understand.
I don’t like making rules (and I won’t make one here: it’s your book and your audience), but for me, the difference is in whether there already is a perfectly serviceable word in English. If there is, you may as well use it. (This is what the Turkey City Lexicon puts under “don’t call a rabbit a smeerp.”) Atevi, mecheiti, and man’chi don’t exist in English.
But since I’m writing a whole book about using language and linguistics in your worldbuilding process, I have much deeper thoughts about it than that, which don’t fit into a newsletter. Plus, I don’t want to give it all away for free ;)
Language and culture are tied very closely together; slang and cussing and proverbs are all a part of culture that’s expressed through language. One thing I remember about the 80s cyberpunk novels I read (not very many, because I didn’t enjoy them) was a heavy reliance on invented technological slang and on coined technological terms. This isn’t surprising, given the point of the genre.
Having characters from different backgrounds use language differently, have different slang or proverbs, cuss differently, makes your world richer. Sometimes there are cultural differences you can show with invented languages for non-human species; sometimes you can show them with coined words from the language you’re writing in.
Like all things with writing, it depends on what you’re doing with your story.
That’s all for now.
I’m not sure which of the handful of titles in my drive I’ll choose next time, or if I’ll be inspired by something I read. Maybe I’ll grump about “chat is a 4th-person pronoun!” Stick around and find out ;)
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