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Comment by wunderlust

Just because a word doesn't have a 1-to-1 correlation with a word in another language doesn't mean it's not translatable; in fact, this website shows that they are translatable. Even more, it's not analytically true that any word in one language shares a perfect mapping with a word in another language. This is evident when you translate a word into another language and back into the native language and find yourself with a different (albeit perhaps related) word.

W.V.O. Quine made some remarkable points about translation [1], although not all philosophers (cf. John Searle) agree that the scenarios he suggested are as problematic as he contended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation

parent wunderlust 4 years ago

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