On the sculptured stones in the Copan valley there are characters which seem to resemble very ancient writing, but this pictographic writing is largely
untranslatable.
This is quite
untranslatable -- it being a play upon the words pecheur, a sinner, and pecheur, a fisherman.
With what stupendous and
untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the women's side: making, as he goes, a kind of iron castanet of the key and the stair-rail!
When Derrida states that nothing is
untranslatable and also that nothing is translatable, he refers to a concept of translation based on "the condition of a certain economy that relates the translatable to the
untranslatable, not as the same to the other, but as same to same or other to other" (Derrida, 2001:178).
This is an
untranslatable concept lying somewhere in the realm of a good atmosphere and the warm, friendly feeling of a time with friends or colleagues.
Because of its linguistically hybrid nature, Triomf was long regarded by many, including the author, as
untranslatable.
There is an equally
untranslatable pun, of course, on `Gallus' (`Frenchman') and `Gallica' (`Frenchwoman').
In the night air around them, "floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies,
untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.
In 1992, he travelled to Chicago to study motivational science yet found the happy-clappy language of the Americans
untranslatable to dour Scots.
Sicambria, he says in a colloquy of 1527, is full of debauched and warlike braggart knights, "who don't own enough land t o stand on" (Isti sibi permittunt bellum cui velint indicere, etiam si pedem vbi ponant non habent) (72) They deserve to be tortured on the rack, he remarks with an
untranslatable pun ("Equites.
Two paragraphs, for example, on a blue-grey background explain why the Latin 'pietas' is an
untranslatable word.
Institutions where the faculty offer such mellow advice can still manage to generate the most complex, confusing, and (for the students)
untranslatable regulations and deadlines.
untranslatable - not capable of being put into another form or style or language; "an untranslatable idiom"; "untranslatable art"