What makes a word untranslatable? How do you take one language’s idioms and transform them into another, even when they rely on grammatical rules that your target language simply doesn’t have? In answering these kinds of questions, we get to take a look at the kind of thought process translators go through on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence basis every time they translate any document. That’s why this week, we’re looking at a tricky little German word: “doch”. It’s an incredibly common part of speech, but even a native German speaker can sometimes find it hard to articulate exactly what it means. So how, then, can we translate it into English? Both languages are as complex and inventive as you’d expect, but they sometimes obey very different rules – even, as we’ll see, when it comes to simple word like “yes” and “no”.

Along the way, we show how fundamentally different languages can still find common ground thanks to their amazing flexibility. We also take a look at some common potential errors in a case like this, and make a brief diversion via the sixteenth century to say hello to William Shakespeare and see what he might have made of a translation problem that might easily flummox an inexperienced linguist. After all, it’s being able to solve problems like this that set the professionals apart from the amateurs.

Our article also touches on another question that translators deal with on a regular basis: how do you strike a balance between preserving the meaning of a text and its original style? What factors guide a translator’s decision to diverge from the source, and what can they do to mitigate the effects of that decision?

Read the whole article to find out what our thoughts are – and once you’re done, why not share your favourite untranslatable words in the comments? Maybe we can all have a go at putting them into our own languages!

This is the summary of an article published in the translation blog of Translators Family, under the title Untranslatable? Doch!, by Oleg Semerikov and Translators Family.

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