understanding untranslatability

Untranslatability refers to instances where a word, phrase, or concept in one language has no direct equivalent in another language. Often called "lexical gaps", they make perfect translation elusive. Importantly, untranslatables aren't totally impossible to translate. Rather, they lack a single concise equivalent, forcing translators to get creative with explanations or adaptations.

I've always been fascinated by untranslatables, but only recently decided to go down a rabbit hole after listening to a conversation between Jackson Dahl and Cyan Banister on the Dialectic podcast. I spent some time reading and absorbing what I could find online, and eventually developed a system to collect, translate, embed, and generate pronunciations for 400+ untranslatable words from across the world. Naturally, I built a fun website to visualize them too.

In parallel, I started reading The WEIRDest People in the World, a book written by Harvard professor Joseph Henrich that aims to explain the history and psychological variation of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies (i.e. "WEIRD") populations.

Lexical gaps reveal something undeniable: each language encodes ideas in its own way, reflecting their histories, cultures, and values. When viewed through the lens of WEIRD psychology, what initially seemed to me like random linguistic quirks started to make some sense. Below, I'll relay some of my research on how untranslatability operates - from its pure linguistic form, to its cultural and cognitive effects, and finally to the evolutionary forces behind WEIRD psychology that may very likely have shaped some of these trends.

linguistic lines

From a purely linguistic standpoint, untranslatability highlights some of the fundamental mismatches that exist between the structure and vocabulary of different languages. For example, while English uses a single term for blue, Russian distinguishes between siniy (dark blue) and goluboy (light blue). Similarly, while English uses uncle to refer to either a mother's brother or a father's brother, Hindi draws a sharp distinction between mama (mother's brother) and chacha (father's brother). Even verbs carry different cognitive burdens. Finnish marks whether an action is habitual or one-off, and Turkish requires speakers to specify whether they directly witnessed an event or only heard about it. Indeed, languages encode fundamentally different ways of categorizing the world.

Importantly, this doesn't mean translation is impossible, only that it's an art of compromise. Often the goal of translation is to achieve a good enough match. For instance, to translate a French novel into English, a sense-for-sense approach works better than word-for-word, so as to preserve the spirit of the original. Sometimes, there truly is no concise equivalent. For example, in David Bellos's book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, he notes that there is no fully adequate Russian translation of something as simple as the word cheese. While the English concept of cheese covers different varieties (cheddar, cottage cheese, cream cheese, etc.), Russians partition it into distinct terms. So in order to translate the word cheese, you'll need more words than one. As these examples show, translation is often possible, but may require extra words or creative tweaks to get the idea across.

values as vocabulary

Many untranslatable words are deeply rooted in a particular culture or history, arising from experiences or values that may not be shared or emphasized elsewhere. In other words, language is laden with culture. When a context or practice exists in one society but not another, the words tied to that context can be hard to translate. If a language has a word for a very local idea (e.g. a specific kind of food, a ritual, or a terrain), other languages might lack an equivalent because they don't share that context. For example, the North Sámi dialect has cuoŋu (the hard crust of snow that forms in late winter after a thaw and refreeze). By contrast, if you try to translate cuoŋu into a language of a tropical culture, you'll wind up needing a long explanation, because the concept simply doesn't exist. Many such environment-specific words (e.g. ice, rain, rice, kinship roles) exist in various languages around the world. These words highlight how languages develop rich vocabularies for the things that matter in their speakers' lives.

Untranslatables also tend to reflect local values and worldviews. For example, the Japanese term ikigai (a reason for living that makes life worthwhile) stems from a culture that prizes finding one's life purpose beyond just material happiness. By contrast, English-speaking cultures coined the terms self-esteem and entrepreneurship, reflecting their individualistic nature. Another example: whereas Western languages have distinct terms like pleasure, joy, contentment, euphoria, other languages lack a direct word for hedonism.

cognitive consequences

It has also been shown that these linguistic differences can have measurable downstream effects on cognition. Color perception is a striking example. Since Russians have different words for light blue and dark blue, they see them as more categorically different. In fact, studies have shown that Russian speakers are slightly faster at distinguishing light vs. dark blue shades than English speakers.

Language also shapes how we think about space and time. Cognitive research performed on a remote Aboriginal community in northern Australia called Pormpuraaw found that the local language doesn't use left or right, but describes everything in cardinal directions (i.e. north, south, east, west). Their sense of space and time is anchored to their landscape, not to their body. Someone might say "there's an ant on your southwest leg" instead of "on your left leg."

More remarkably, their concept of time follows the same pattern. In an experiment asking participants to arrange photos showing temporal progressions (e.g. a man aging or a banana being eaten), English speakers consistently lay them out left-to-right and Hebrew speakers right-to-left - both mirroring their writing direction. Pormpuraawans, however, organize the photos east-to-west. When facing south, they lay them out left to right; when facing north, right to left. In other words, the Pormpuraawans unconsciously map time onto the sun's path across the sky.

a WEIRD evolution

In order to better understand how and why these differences exist, allow me to take a brief detour. The work of Joseph Henrich and colleagues reveals that WEIRD populations are particularly unusual across cognitive, perceptual, and social domains compared to other populations. WEIRD people tend be more analytically minded and individualistic. For example, Westerners often focus on objects and personal traits, whereas East Asians more often think holistically about relationships and context. Westerners also exhibit behaviors (trusting strangers, joining voluntary groups, prioritizing personal choice) that are less common elsewhere.

In his book, Henrich argues that WEIRD societies evolved this way as a result of institutional and religious reforms that gradually weakened kin-based social structures and trust in impersonal institutions. Specifically, the Catholic Church's marriage and family program (forbidding cousin marriage, promoting nuclear families, discouraging kin alliances) was central in this process, as it undermined the foundations of kin-based society and created a social environment that favored more analytical and individualistic thinking.

This historical context provides a useful frame for understanding the nuances of untranslatable words. For example, we can see how WEIRD languages might lack fine-grained kinship distinctions (like Hindi's mama vs. chacha) because they've evolved away from tight kin-based networks toward more impersonal institutions. We can also see why English speakers created separate words like entrepreneurship and self-esteem, which reflect an emphasis on individual agency and achievement, while languages from non-WEIRD populations developed terms for collective harmony and contextual relationships. Even spatial and temporal perception follows this pattern. Where WEIRD languages anchor space to their individual bodies (left, right), the Pormpuraaw language anchors it to their landscapes, revealing a worldview grounded in orientation rather than ego. In essence, these untranslatables reveal fundamentally different ways of organizing social reality, attention, and values that emerged from distinct cultural-institutional pathways.

the feeling is mutual

Sometimes untranslatable words are hard to translate succinctly, but not wholly alien. Despite deeply rooted differences, human experiences often overlap across cultures, even if labeled differently.

For example, even though the Malay phrase gigi jarang (tooth gap) is not directly translatable to English, English speakers can still understand the concept. We just describe it with a phrase (gap between teeth) instead of a single lexical item. Similarly, although English speakers didn't have the word hygge (a feeling of cozy contentment and conviviality) until we picked it up from Danes, we certainly still love a good "Netflix and chill". In fact, once exposed to the word, we eagerly embraced it, suggesting the underlying experience was relatable all along. So while untranslatable words offer insight into unique cultural contexts, we shouldn't assume they signal an utterly incommunicable concept. This concept of loanwords, or words borrowed from other languages, shows that often the gap is in vocabulary, not in the ability to feel or understand. The list of words that English speakers have adopted from other languages is long and varied. You'll probably recognize at least a few of the words you see in Lexiconic.

closing thoughts

In the end, untranslatability is a celebration of human diversity. Each language is a repository of its speakers' collective experience: their climate, cuisine, social structure, beliefs, and history. Untranslatables remind us that there are many ways to see the world. The effort to translate the untranslatable (to explain schadenfreude in English, or to grasp an Aboriginal directional sense of time) is a profoundly valuable exercise. It forces us to step outside our familiar categories and look at life through another cultural lens. In doing so, we often find that what seemed utterly foreign is in fact relatable, perhaps just from a different angle.

In a world that is both globalized and rich in local cultures, untranslatable words teach us humility: not everything we know maps neatly onto someone else's lexicon, and vice versa, but with curiosity and effort, we can extend our own worldview. Each time we borrow a word like hygge, karma, or fiesta, we're acknowledging that every language has something to teach about being human.