The Words We Cannot Carry

When you translate a poem into another language, you often lose something.

A word may carry a feeling that no word in the second language has.

For example, the Portuguese word "saudade" means a deep, sad longing for something you love but cannot have.

English has "longing," but it feels weaker.

Translators call this problem "untranslatability." Some ideas are tied to the culture that made them.

A Japanese word may describe a feeling only Japanese life creates.

If you simply replace it, the reader misses the point.

Good translators do not give up.

Instead, they add a short explanation or choose a picture-like phrase.

Sometimes they leave the original word and let the reader feel its strangeness.

This keeps the flavour of the source.

However, it can make the text harder to read.

So every translator must decide: how much should I explain, and how much should I leave alone?

There is no perfect answer.

Yet the effort itself is valuable, because it shows that languages are not simple copies of one another.

Each one sees the world a little differently, and translation lets us share that view.