Can meaning survive translation?

Jakobson: almost everything is translatable

The linguist Roman Jakobson set the terms of the modern debate in a 1959 essay. He distinguished three kinds of translation: within a language (rewording), between languages (the usual sense), and between sign systems (say, a novel into film). His central claim was optimistic: any cognitive content can be conveyed in any language, because where a word is missing a language can borrow it, coin a new one, or explain it with a phrase.

The hard case, Jakobson argued, is where meaning is welded to form. In poetry, puns, and wordplay, the sound, rhythm, and double meanings are part of what is meant, and those cannot travel intact. There his verdict was blunt: such work is not translated but creatively transposed, rebuilt as a new poem that answers the original rather than copying it.

Equivalence, not identity

This is why professional translators rarely chase word-for-word matching. The Bible translator and theorist Eugene Nida drew a lasting contrast between formal equivalence, which stays close to the original wording, and dynamic or functional equivalence, which aims to reproduce the same effect on a new reader. A joke should still land; a warning should still alarm. Achieving that often means changing the words considerably.

So what actually shifts in translation is usually the periphery of meaning rather than its core: connotation, register, rhythm, idiom, and cultural echo. A competent translation of a news report loses almost nothing that matters. A translation of a sonnet or a sacred text loses more, because in those the how is inseparable from the what, and every choice trades one kind of faithfulness for another.

The genuinely hard cases

Some concepts have no ready equivalent because a culture has lexicalized an experience others leave nameless. The positive psychologist Tim Lomas catalogued more than two hundred 'untranslatable' well-being words from around the world, from Portuguese 'saudade' to Danish 'hygge.' These are not truly untranslatable; they are translated by a whole paragraph instead of a word, which is itself evidence that meaning survives even when a single term does not.

The philosopher Walter Benjamin gave the most demanding view. In his 1923 essay on the translator's task, he argued that a translation is not a copy but an afterlife of the original, and that great translation should let the foreignness of the source show through rather than smoothing it into something that reads as if written locally. On this view meaning does survive, but transformed: translation does not preserve a work unchanged so much as carry it forward into a new life.