Care to elaborate? As a English/Mandarin/Japanese speaker, I am certainly acutely aware of the limitations of translating from one language in to another, but find such an assertion hard to accept without concrete examples.

While travelling and working in Sweden I picked up enough of the language (alas, now gone) to converse reasonably well over dinner with people I hadn't met before. They were fluent in English, my colleague was fluent in Swedish.

I asked about the word "varsågod." It seemed to have many translations, often different for different contexts, and I was wondering how they all perceived it. The consensus came only after about an hour of back and forth. There is no translation, even when the context is known.

The best I've come up with is "All is well," but that really, really doesn't cover it. Sometimes it means "You're welcome," sometimes it means "Here you are," and there are other contexts.

And the English translations don't carry the extra meanings, the baggage. It just feels untranslatable. No translation I've seen or heard carries all of the meanings and nuances.

Another example is from French. The phrase "Je vous en prie" is often translated as "You're welcome," but it's also very, very formal. You'd hear it from staff in hotels, perhaps, and perhaps in the very best restaurants.

But the point is that while it effectively means "You're welcome" it actually carries more information. It also says: and our relationship is a formal one, such as staff to employer, and I'm in the subordinate position.

There is no way to say that in English without spelling it out explicitly, and once you've done so you've lost the sense of the original anyway.

It's like explaining a joke. Once you've done so you've given the understanding needed, but lost the humor.

Similarly with so many things in translation. To carry all the meaning properly sometimes you have to explain or describe the meaning, and then it's no longer actually a translation.

The thing I find most interesting is just how many monoglots claim that this can't possibly be true and give many excellent reasons, while so many polyglots simply accept it as fact. My wife is fluent in French and works copy-editing translations from German (and other languages) into English. I've seen this problem "in action" as it were, and it's why good translators cost so much, while mediocre translators don't.

EDIT: corrected the Swedish word - thanks. My spoken and reading Swedish was always better than my written.

If you feel like procrastinating and want to have a laugh at how ambiguous and strange Swedish can be I recommend Mastering Swedish by slay radio: http://www.slayradio.org/mastering_swedish.php

It sounds as if you are saying the lack of a short code in a language makes a concept untranslatable.

But that doesn't seem right. In 1943, I couldn't translate a document about nuclear reactors into French or Spanish because the only languages with words for "nuclear reactor" were English and German. Does that make "nuclear reactor" untranslatable?

Of course, once the concept became relevant to French speakers, they borrowed or created a short coding.

From what you've said, you can translate "je vous en prie" to "you're welcome and I mean that with the respect a subordinate accords his superiors". That just doesn't have a short coding in English because the concept being encoded is rarely relevant to English speakers.

In programming terms, (map f lst) translates to c, it's just not as short.

Your point about "nuclear reactor" is well taken, but, ultimately, not really relevant. No amount of explanation makes a joke funny to someone who doesn't "get it." Further, many coordinate bilinguals never get this feeling, simply because they're coordinates. Compound bilinguals do get it, and find it impossible to explain.

And here I am, once again, trying to explain a joke to someone who doesn't get it.

(Please note - that last was an analogy. This isn't a joke, it is real that there are some terms that just don't translate, even when you expand your translation into an explanation. Some things need to be experienced, and cannot be appreciated from logic and reason alone.)

Would it be fair to say that the particular phrase, rather than conveying information, causes a particular emotional reaction in the hearer? I may not experience what you experience and some particular phrase might simply be a short code for that feeling.

But that doesn't mean the information cannot be conveyed. I can explain fairly easily what 'orange' means to a blind person: "Objects and parts of objects are associated to unique colors, which humans can distinguish via vision. [geometric optics skipped.] One particular color is orange."

They haven't experienced orange, in the sense that the "orange" set of neurons in their brain hasn't fired. But that doesn't mean they lack information when I say "object X is orange."

Personally, I've experienced it, and perhaps the fact that I can't explain it to you, who haven't experienced it, is more convincing than the attempts at explanations.

Actually, the study of semantics, which is highly logical, will often fail at describing the "true meaning" of an utterance. This is where pragmatics come in, and, frankly, a far more interesting area of study and occasionally even applicable in every day life.

The most useful thing I got out of my semantics course was that I never, ever, want to take that stream ever again.

I'm nowhere near fluent in Japanese, so I'm not the best person to get into it. I do have a couple good friends who are native speakers or expats with a very high level of understanding. A good mate runs a bilingual IT firm in Tokyo, and can handle even technical/legal Japanese to a pretty high level.

Sometimes I've asked, "How do I say XYZ?" and there's no real way to say it without describing it. To go back the other way, what would the English equivalent of "domo" or "daijobu" be? Daijobu is something like "don't sweat it", but that's not quite right. I'm not sure there's anything quite like domo.

But, that's common enough in other languages. German doesn't "cheers", which is a pretty useful and versatile British English word, but that's not what I mean here. From my general understanding, it's very hard to put together appropriate forms of disagreement in Japanese. Like, it might not possible to say something like, "You're wrong, but I respect the sentiment", or "Agree to disagree."

I'm not sure on those specific examples. I know one of the first things people learn about doing business in Japan is you'll rarely hear "no" from a subordinate, so you have to be very aware of something like, "That might be difficult..." - that might mean it's impossible.

Not entirely sure - I've spent a bit of time living and working in a lot of places, and picked up touches of a fair few languages. I've had people translate for me to some extent or other in German, Dutch, Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese. By far, the most stumbling and "that's hard to say" I got was in Japanese. I'd actually be curious to have someone more skilled with the language elaborate more to see if I'm on the mark here.

That said, the character of the Japanese language is really beautiful - I love reading Japanese literature translated into English. You'll commonly see a very factual, plain description, followed by a very profound beautiful statement mixed in with minimal transition. Eiji Yoshikawa's "Musashi" is pretty much a must-read for anyone talented who feels some friction with more mainstream and normal society.

Now, let me clarify upfront that my minor (technically a "joint-degree", but effectively a minor) is in Linguistics, so this may get wordy and technical.

What you are mostly describing is a not a restriction of the language itself, but of social conventions. You can certainly say "いいえ、できません". While it is true that Japanese has a relatively substantial honorific structure when compared to English, there are other languages with even richer systems, such as Malay.

One thing that makes Japanese stand out amongst the ones you have listed is the fact that it is a language isolate, meaning there are no other languages that are "linguistically related". (While technically in the Japonic family, there is some controversy around the categorization of Japanese dialects, which muddies the family categorization as well). Korean is another isolate, and, as far as I know, the only language that is remotely like Japanese in terms of grammar and morphology. German, Dutch and Spanish all belong in the Indo-European family, and there are some obvious structural similarities. Mandarin Chinese is certainly not Indo-European, but it also lacks a non-trivial inflection system, and has a basic word order that is not unlike Germanic languages.

Japanese, on the other hand, does not share this trait. Consequently, there are certain grammar constructs in English that are essentially impossible to transform into Japanese; it takes a speaker sufficient in both to first completely comprehend an utterance and then re-express it. Add to this the many subtle semantic differences in words, and it's not surprising that you will get a lot of "that's hard to say"s. However, this doesn't mean that something is untranslatable. Speaking from experience, us polyglots do occasionally use it as an excuse that more precisely means "the exchange which must take place for me to extract more context out of you to effectively perform your request is something I don't want to spend energy on at the moment." ;)

I know the word order is vastly different and the honorific system obscures the language, but what about more fundamental tendencies of Mandarin such as the heavy dependency on chronology or the kind of general sounds of the phonemes. I know, for instance, that it can often take a second or two for me to differentiate Mandarin from Korean or Japanese when it being spoken quickly and loudly (such as when you first turn on a movie).

Structurally, Japanese and Korean is almost identical. The morphology system are similar, they have the same word order, are both tonal in a similar way, and there are even parallels that can be drawn in terms of their phonology; some words are even phonemically identical. However, their core inventory of phonemes is quite different: there are sounds in Korean that just do not occur in Japanese. Like Japanese, the categorization of Korean is debated; Wikipedia is helpful here if you want to know more.

Now, Mandarin Chinese is entirely different. The tonal system is different, it lacks an overt inflection system, word order is different, and the phoneme inventory is, again, different. While there is vocabulary sharing going on, it's hard to see any technical relationships between them.

I've heard a number of different stories on how the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago were settled by the Chinese, from the Chinese, but it just doesn't seem plausible considering the linguistics of the regions. What history I did study in Japan simply never mentioned it. And, to be honest, that is the extent of my historical knowledge of the languages.

Japanese on the other hand is considered more likely to be separate but high influenced due to word sharing from the many wars between China and Japan. this seems pretty plausible considering the sharing of the written language which is widely considered to be Chinese in origin.

It's all interesting because I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the ancient history is obscured by the three proud nations.

If you want to make an argument on the effectiveness of communication, please use a quantitative or otherwise qualified argument, rather than exotic anecdotes.