[5] Furthermore, Derrida noted that when God condemned the world to a multiplicity of tongues, he created a paradoxical need and impossibility of translation.
[5] 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[3] "in which there is nothing that cannot be made to make sense.
Baer quotes Jean-Jacques Rousseau defining true genius as "the kind that creates and makes everything out of nothing".
In most cases, Thai people use words which express the relation between speaker and listener according to their respective roles.
To be translated into English correctly, it is proper to use "I" and "you" for these example statements, but normal Thai perceptions of relation are lost in the process.
Likewise, English lacks a productive grammatical means to show indirection but must instead rely on periphrasis, that is the use of multiple words to explain an idea.
Finnish grammar, on the contrary, allows the regular production of a series of verbal derivatives, each of which involves a greater degree of indirection.
Similar to the Turkic miş, nearly every Quechua sentence is marked by an evidential clitic, indicating the source of the speaker's knowledge (and how certain they are about the statement).
German, Dutch and Danish have a wealth of modal particles that are particularly difficult to translate as they convey sense or tone rather than strictly grammatical information.
The most infamous example perhaps is doch (Dutch: toch, Danish: dog), which roughly means "Don't you realize that .
The same Der Krieg war doch noch nicht verloren with slightly changed pronunciation can also mean excuse in defense to a question: .
The following example comes from Portuguese: Some South Slavic words that have no English counterparts are doček, a gathering organized at someone's arrival (the closest translation would be greeting or welcome, although a 'doček' is not necessarily positive); and limar, a sheet metal worker.
Thai also disregards gender when aunts or uncles are younger than their parents, and has one word for all nieces, nephews, and grandchildren.
Another common issue is translating brother or sister into Chinese or Japanese, which have separate words for older and younger ones.
There is no standard English word for the Italian "consuoceri", Yiddish "makhatunim",[7] Latin συμπέθεροι/συμπεθερές , consocer, Spanish "consuegros" or Portuguese "consogros": a gender-neutral collective plural like "co-in-laws".
Spanish and Portuguese contrast "brother" with "brother-in-law" ("hermano/irmão", "cuñado/cunhado"); "son" with "son-in-law" ("hijo/filho", "yerno/genro"), and similarly for female relatives like "sister-in-law" ("cuñada/cunhada") and "daughter-in-law" ("nuera/nora").
In Russian, fifteen different words cover relations by marriage, enough to confuse many native speakers [citation needed][dubious – discuss].
[citation needed] Japanese has a concept, amae, about the closeness of parent-child relationship, that is supposedly unique to that language and culture as it applies to bosses and workers.
The most well-known example to English speakers is probably the Japanese word 先輩 (senpai), referring to a senior classmate or colleague.
In Chinese, people can still call it wasabi by its Japanese sound, or pronounce it by its Hanzi characters, 山葵 (pinyin: shān kuí).
As an illustration, consider another example from Douglas Hofstadter, which he published in one of his "Metamagical Themas" columns in Scientific American.
Well, first ladies reside at the prime minister's address, and at the time, the woman living at 10 Downing Street was Margaret Thatcher.
But a different attribute that first ladies have is that they are married to heads of government, so perhaps a better answer was Denis Thatcher, but he probably would not have relished the title."
[9] The two areas which most nearly approach total untranslatability are poetry and puns; poetry is difficult to translate because of its reliance on the sounds (for example, rhymes) and rhythms of the source language; puns, and other similar semantic wordplay, because of how tightly they are tied to the original language.
The French title of the translated play is "L'importance d'être Constant", replicating and transposing the pun; however, the character Ernest had to be renamed, and the allusion to trickery was lost.
A recent Hungarian translation of the same play by Ádám Nádasdy applied a similar solution, giving the subtitle "Szilárdnak kell lenni" (lit.
The Asterix comic strip is renowned for its French puns; its translators have found many ingenious English substitutes.
Another example given by Hofstadter is the translation of the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, with its wealth of neologisms and portmanteau words, into a number of foreign tongues.
A simple example of gematric power might be the famous proverb נכנס יין יצא סוד (nikhnas yayin yåSå sōd), or lit.
[13][14] In the modern era, Aleister Crowley also argued that the supposed effectiveness of barbarous names rested in their utterance, not their meaning.