Lost And Found - II

Reading the results of Today Translations' poll on The Most Untranslatable Word In The World, I couldn't help thinking about the very nature of translation itself. While it may be true that many individual words have a hard time migrating from one language from another, and it's certainly true, as the TT poll makes clear, that the translation of specialized sporting terms such as "googly" involve a translation not just from one language to another, but from one culture to another ("There Is No Such As Word As Googly In Lithuanian", Confesses Researcher), there is also the old and instructive Italian saying that equates traduttore (translator) with traditore (traitor). And as I read the poll results, some quotations from Jakobson and Boas also came to mind:

The real difference between languages lies not in what they can or can't express but in what speakers must or need not express. (Jakobson)

When we say "The man killed the bull", we understand that a unique and definite man has killed, in the past, a unique and definite bull. It is not possible for us to express this is event in such a way that doubt remains whether it concerns one definite person or several persons (or bulls), or the present or the past. We must choose between these options, and one or the other must be chosen. (Boas)

If some grammatical category is absent in a given language, its meaning may be translated into this language by lexical means. ... It is more difficult to remain faithful to the original when we translate into a language provided with a certain grammatical category from a language devoid of such a category. ... As Boas neatly observed, the grammatical pattern of a language (as opposed to its lexical stock) determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed in the given language. ... In order to translate accurately the English sentence "I hired a worker," a Russian needs supplementary information, whether this action was completed or not and whether the worker was a man or a woman... (Jakobson)