Untranslatability in Translatıon Studies or the Impossibility of Translation

Abstract

One of the most complicated issues in the history of translation is, undoubtedly, the concept of untranslatability. These debates have remained up to date, from studies of very early translation to modern translation studies today and have produced many products in theoretical terms. The untranslatability or the impossibility of translation from the past to the present has preserved its polymorphism and impure structure. Based on the nature of these concepts in the historical process, it has been observed that the sources have two different meanings and that the untranslatability reflects the interface between these two meanings and these two structures, and it has been attempted to understand how this reality is formed. Untranslatability is primarily a translation phenomenon that has been a key word in the debate on the impossibility of translation from ancient times to the present. The ongoing discussion of untranslatability has been conducted on the platforms of equivalence-seeking attempts regarding the sound image-concept relationship, the nature of meaning and philosophy of language in its historical course since eighteen century. Untranslatability has been handled within the framework of western dualistic approaches such as Universalist and Monadist, as well as the twentieth-century postmodern approaches, i.e. Deconstructive. The dualistic nature of the concept or its being an ambiguous phenomenon makes it possible to make more than one definition of untranslatability. Untranslatability also has an intricate structure that is by no means considered separate from the concept of translatability. Therefore, throughout the article, the role of “untranslatability", which incorporates the term “translatability” in the symbolic nature of language, in other words, in translation per se, is questioned based on this ascertainment. Also the discussions on "everything can be translated" or "nothing can be translated" at the two extremes and the opinions in between were included in the analysis within the framework of this connection. One of the important results is that the phenomenon of untranslatability can actually be used as a translation strategy that makes translation possible. In addition, it has been observed that translation is a process of completion and interpretation, and in order to understand the concept of untranslatability, its linguistic, cognitive and philosophical layers must be understood and addressed.