Editing Untranslatability (section)

== Theories ==
There is a school of thought identified with [[Walter Benjamin]] that identifies the concept of "sacred" in relation to translation, and this pertains to the text that is untranslatable because its meaning and letter cannot be disassociated.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Through a Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination|last=Hawley|first=John Charles|publisher=Fordham University Press|year=1996|isbn=0823216365|location=New York|pages=284}}</ref> It stems from the view that translation should realize the imagined perfect relationship with the original text.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Untranslatability Goes Global|last1=Levine|first1=Suzanne|last2=Lateef-Jan|first2=Katie|publisher=Taylor & Francis|year=2018|isbn=9781138744301|location=New York|pages=22}}</ref> This theory highlights the paradoxical nature of translation wherein it—as a process—assumes the forms of necessity and impossibility at the same time. This is demonstrated in [[Jacques Derrida]]'s analysis of the myth of [[Tower of Babel|Babel]], a word which he described as a name that means confusion and also a proper name of God.<ref name=":1">{{Cite book|title=Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery|last=Waisman|first=Sergio Gabriel|publisher=Bucknell University Press|year=2005|isbn=0838755925|location=Lewisburg|pages=64}}</ref> Furthermore, Derrida noted that when God condemned the world to a multiplicity of tongues, he created a paradoxical need and impossibility of translation.<ref name=":1" />

Derrida himself has put forward his own notion of the untranslatability of the text, arguing in his early works such as the ''Writing and Difference'' and ''Margins of Philosophy'' that there is an excess of untranslatable meaning in literature, and it cannot be reduced to a closed system or a restricted economy<ref name=":0" /> "in which there is nothing that cannot be made to make sense."<ref>{{Cite book|title=Margins of Philosophy|last=Derrida|first=Jacques|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=1982|isbn=0226143260|location=Chicago|page=20}}</ref>

Brian James Baer posits that untranslatability is sometimes seen by nations as proof of their national genius. Literature that can be easily translated may be considered as lacking originality, while translated works themselves may be regarded merely as imitations. Baer quotes [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]] defining true genius as "the kind that creates and makes everything out of nothing". Paraphrasing [[Robert Frost]]'s remark about poetry ("Poetry is what gets lost in translation"), Baer suggests that "one could define national identity as that which is lost in translation". He further quotes Alexandra Jaffe: "When translators talk about untranslatable, they often reinforce the notion that each language has its own 'genius', an 'essence' that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the 'soul' of its culture or people".<ref name="Baer 2015"/>

Quite often, a text or utterance that is considered to be "untranslatable" is considered a ''lacuna'', or [[lexical gap]]. That is, there is no one-to-one equivalence between the word, expression or turn of phrase in the source language and another word, expression or turn of phrase in the target language. A translator can, however, resort to a number of translation procedures to compensate for this. From this perspective, untranslatability or difficulty of translation does not always carry deep [[linguistic relativity]] implications; [[denotation]] can virtually always be translated, given enough [[circumlocution]], although [[connotation]] may be [[ineffability|ineffable]] or inefficient to convey.