By Han Wang
Introduction: The Problem of Equivalence
Translation has long been understood through the metaphor of transport: meaning is contained within one language, conveyed across a linguistic border, and delivered in another. This metaphor construes the translator’s task as a fundamentally technical undertaking, one concerned with the identification of equivalents, the preservation of semantic content, and the fidelity of reproduction. On this account, the translator locates what a word signifies in the source language and finds the corresponding term in the target language. The task, in short, is one of substitution. This metaphor, however, obscures more than it reveals. Translation is not, I want to suggest, about the safe conveyance of meaning from one language to another, but about confronting the inherent limits of meaning itself. Certain words resist translation not because they are lexically opaque, but because they are embedded in forms of life that are irreducible to other linguistic and cultural frameworks. This resistance, far from being a problem to be solved, is a philosophical problem of the first order. It brings into focus the tension between the universality of human experience and the particularity of cultural expression, compelling us to ask what happens when meaning refuses transfer, and what that refusal discloses about the nature of language, culture, and understanding.
Two thinkers, separated by historical context and intellectual tradition, converge on a shared concern with the limits of language and the challenges of cultural mediation. The first is Walter Benjamin, whose essay “The Task of the Translator” offers a framework moving decisively beyond equivalence. Benjamin argues that translation is not reproduction but survival: a transformation that grants the original a new life while acknowledging the inevitability of loss. The second is Benjamin Constant. His reflections on language and cultural translation — though less systematically developed than Benjamin’s — offer a complementary perspective on the relationship between linguistic expression and cultural particularity. Constant, himself a translator of German literature into French, understood that rendering a text from one language to another is never neutral, always shaped by the translator’s own cultural and historical position. Applying these frameworks to specific translation challenges encountered in rendering Angela Slatter’s short story Ash from English into French, I argue that culturally embedded meanings resist transfer across linguistic borders, and that the untranslatable, on my reading, is not a failure of translators but a condition of language itself.
Section 1: Benjamin and the Task of the Translator
Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” written in 1921 as a preface to his translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, opens with a claim as provocative as it is foundational. The purpose of translation is not, Benjamin insists, to communicate meaning to readers who lack access to the original. Translation, properly understood, is not a communicative act in any conventional sense. Were it such, it would be a derivative and secondary activity, a poor substitute for the original, but translation, for Benjamin, is not a substitute but a mode of its own. The original work of art — whether a poem, a novel, or a philosophical text — is not, on this account, a fixed entity. It persists through translation in a form that is not reproduction but transformation. Benjamin’s formulation — “Translation is a form of survival. The life of the original attains its ever-renewed latest and most abundant flowering in translation”[1] — is not mere metaphor but a claim about the ontology of the work of art. The original does not simply exist; it exists in time, changing as it is read, interpreted, and translated. Translation, on this account, is one of the ways in which the original continues to live. Benjamin introduces the concept of pure language to articulate what translation gestures toward: a horizon, a realm beyond any particular tongue where meaning is no longer tethered to the contingencies of any one language, and translation, for Benjamin, points toward this horizon though it does not reach it; the translator, on this view, is not a messenger transporting meaning intact from one linguistic sphere to another, but rather a witness standing at the threshold of language, attesting to its inherent limits. The broken vessel — Benjamin’s central metaphor — captures the condition of all translation: the source language and the target language are fragments of a whole that cannot be fully reconstructed. Translation attempts to fit them together, but the fit is never perfect, for something is always lost, yet something is also gained, the original being given a new life, a new audience, a new context. This, for Benjamin, is not failure but the condition of translation. Benjamin’s framework reverses the conventional hierarchy, for in the traditional view the original stands superior to the translation, the translation being a derivative, a copy, a lesser version. But Benjamin argues that this hierarchy is mistaken, for the original, far from being complete or self-sufficient, is constituted by its incompleteness — an incompleteness both revealed and, in part, remedied by translation — and the translation does not serve the original but the original serves the translation, the original being incomplete and the translation extending its life. This has profound implications for untranslatability: if translation is not about reproducing the original, the failure to reproduce it is not a failure at all but the condition of translation, and the untranslatable word is not a problem to be solved but a reminder of the horizon beyond any single language, a call to recognise that meaning is always in motion, always incomplete, and the task of the translator, for Benjamin, is not to fill the gap but to mark it, to show where meaning escapes, to point toward what cannot be said.
Section 2: Benjamin Constant and Cultural Mediation
Constant’s reflections on translation complement Benjamin’s account by shifting attention from language itself to the cultural situation of the translator. While Benjamin emphasises the impossibility of perfect equivalence between languages, Constant recognises that translators never approach texts from a neutral position. Every act of translation is shaped by the translator’s historical circumstances, cultural assumptions, and interpretive habits. Translation therefore involves more than the transfer of words; it requires mediation between distinct forms of life — different ways of living, thinking, and meaning-making that cannot be reduced to simple vocabulary differences.
This perspective is particularly valuable because it explains a dimension of translation that Benjamin largely leaves implicit. Even when a lexical equivalent exists, translators may hesitate, adapt, or reinterpret whenever the source text conflicts with the norms of their own cultural world. Translation becomes not merely a linguistic activity but a negotiation between perspectives. The translator is not an invisible conduit through which meaning passes unchanged, but an active participant whose cultural horizon inevitably shapes the resulting text.
Taken together, Benjamin and Constant suggest that translation is constrained by two forms of limitation. The first arises from language itself: no translation can reproduce all the meanings carried by the original. The second arises from the translator’s cultural position: every act of interpretation is influenced by the values, assumptions, and expectations that the translator brings to the text. These limitations do not represent failures of translation but conditions under which translation becomes possible. Yet limitation is not only loss. Every literary translation, however faithful it attempts to be, also adds new meaning and associations — meanings that the original did not possess, but which now become part of its afterlife.
Section 3: Translation as Survival — Evidence from Practice
Benjamin’s theory, however abstract in its formulation, manifests in the concrete decisions of translation practice. The encounter with a word resisting translation is not a problem to be solved but a limit to be recognised: a reminder that certain meanings are inseparable from the linguistic and cultural contexts in which they arise. This section examines three such moments from the translation of Slatter’s Ash from English into French, each illustrating a distinct dimension of Benjamin’s argument.
3.1 Single Word Examples
The line occurs late in the story, when the narrator Blodwen reflects on her relationship with the old man who taught her magic. Consider first the word ‘gainsay’: in translating Ash, one encounters the sentence “Who was I to gainsay such a powerful man?”[2]— a term archaic, unfamiliar even to many native speakers, and rendered by a standard bilingual dictionary as ‘to deny’ or ‘to refute,’ yet in context the word carries a further layer, not merely contradiction but the questioning of authority, the audacity of speaking back to power. The dictionary translation captures the semantic content but loses the pragmatic weight, a loss that is precisely what Benjamin describes, for the original word carries a specific historical and cultural register — a world in which authority is contested through a particular kind of linguistic gesture. That register does not survive intact in translation, the word persisting but its weight not, the translator approximating but not reproducing, where the vessel breaks. What is lost here is not the dictionary definition but the gesture, for ‘gainsay’ is not merely a word but an act, the act of challenging power, of resisting authority. The translator who chooses contredire (“to contradict”) captures the act but not the historical gravity, while the translator who chooses nier (“to deny”) captures the semantic content but loses the gesture entirely, neither being fully adequate yet the translator, however, must choose. This is not a failure of the translator; it is a feature of language itself.
The word ‘dam’ — appearing in the sentence “Now I would not ruin her life by telling her dam where to find her” — refers in English to the female parent of an animal, and when Blodwen uses it to refer to Gwenllian, she is deliberately reducing her to something less than human, a mere breeder, an animal mother, the word carrying contempt, dehumanisation, and dismissal, yet in French no direct equivalent exists, the closest options — mère (‘mother’), génitrice (‘birth-giver’), mère biologique (‘biological mother’) — all lacking the contempt, the word surviving but its edge not.
The word lilts — appearing in the sentence “The voice lilts, a flower on the breeze” — suggests in English a light, musical, rising-and-falling quality, not merely lightness but a specific kind of lightness, hypnotic, almost enchanted, yet the closest French equivalent, flotte (“floats”), captures the lightness but loses the musicality, the rhythm, the hypnosis, the word surviving but its texture not
The word shabby — appearing in the sentence “I pull the shabby fabric of my old cloak close around me” — implies not just wear but visible poverty, the kind of wear that is shameful, that causes others to look away, and the French translator must choose between usée (“worn”) and élimée (“threadbare”), the former neutral, the latter carrying the visible degradation, the choice being not between right and wrong but between approximation and loss, the word surviving but its fullness not. Each of these examples illustrates the same point: translation is not about finding equivalents but about managing loss. The word survives in translation, but its context — its cultural weight, its emotional register, its historical resonance — does not. The translator being not a carrier but a witness to the gap.
3.2 Noun Phrase Example
Early in the story, a mother pulls her daughter away from Blodwen, fearing that the witch will curse them. The mother’s warning is delivered in a tone of contempt and fear. Consider second the phrase ‘her kind’. In Ash, a mother warns her child — “Bitsy, don’t look, her kind will curse you” — a phrase carrying in English a dismissive, reductive, dehumanising weight, not merely describing a category of people; it is actively othering the witch, positioning her as something less than fully human. The phrase not simply describes; it judges, categorises, dismisses, excludes. The most natural French equivalent — les gens comme elle (“people like her”) — is grammatically correct and semantically faithful but lacks the dismissive edge, the dehumanising force of the original being flattened, the word surviving in translation, but its cultural weight does not. Benjamin would recognise this as the condition of all translation, for the original is given a new life in French but that life is not the same life, the dismissive force of ‘her kind’ being embedded in a specific cultural history of categorising and excluding people based on their identity. That history does not transfer, the word arriving but the world from which it came not.
3.3 Sentence Example
The narrator is recounting the terms of her apprenticeship with the old man. She lists the things she did not do to earn his teaching. Consider third the line ‘I did not warm his bed’ — the most difficult moment in the translation of Ash — a line stark, corporeal, devoid of rhetorical ornamentation, not a suggestion, not a euphemism, but a statement, the author having intended it to be precisely that. For a translator from a culture where indirectness is a deeply embedded value — where respect is shown through restraint, where the unsaid carries as much weight as the said — this line presents not a linguistic challenge but a cultural one. The instinct is to not render the line directly but to soften it, to preserve the factual content while adjusting the register, to make the text acceptable to the cultural norms of the translator’s own world. The challenge here was not primarily linguistic. French possesses ways of expressing the sentence’s basic meaning. Rather, the difficulty emerged from the tension between the source text’s directness and my own cultural assumptions concerning indirectness and propriety. Benjamin’s framework illuminates why this is not a problem to be solved: translation is not about finding the perfect equivalent but about marking the gap, showing where meaning escapes. The line is untranslatable not because it is complex, but because its force is tied to a specific cultural and literary register that does not overlap with the target language. The translator approximates but cannot reproduce. The vessel is broken. The line is untranslatable not because it is complex but because its force is tied to a specific cultural and literary register that does not overlap with the target language. The translator approximates where the vessel breaks. Constant’s perspective helps explain another dimension of this difficulty. The problem did not arise because French lacked the resources to express the sentence. Rather, it emerged from the encounter between the cultural world of the text and my own assumptions concerning propriety and indirectness. Translation here becomes an act of mediation between horizons. The translator is not merely confronted by limits of language, as Benjamin suggests, but by the limits of their own cultural perspective. In this respect, Constant reminds us that translation is never performed from a neutral position.
3.4 Paragraph Example
Consider, finally, a longer passage — the description of Gwenllian in the opening section of Ash:
Gwenllian occupies a comfortable chair near a wide window, and the moonlight angles in upon her. She, too, has aged, though less dramatically than I. She is older than me but looks younger. Her existence has been cushioned by wealth. There are lines on her face but her make-up cunningly disguises them. There are no flecks of silver in her dark hair. The sleeves of her dress are slashed (not so fashionably, but I know why she wears them thus) and I can see the skin there. Her face, neck and forearms are pink, youthful, expensively bought. My best work.[3]
This passage functions in English as a quiet accumulation of details, each contributing to the reader’s growing unease. The verb occupies suggests a claim upon space; the moonlight does not simply fall but angles in, as though it, too, is scrutinising her. The narrative voice is clinical, almost detached, yet the final sentence — My best work — reveals the narrator’s complex emotional relationship to what she has done. The passage also contains a subtle foreshadowing: the reader learns later that Gwenllian’s youthful skin has been purchased at the cost of her daughter. In French, much of this texture is inevitably lost. The verb ‘occupies’ must become est installée (“is settled”), which cannot reproduce the sense of territorial possession; ‘cushioned by wealth’, which carries a faint contempt, becomes capitonné par la richesse (“padded by wealth”), which comes closer but still loses some of the dismissive edge. What is lost here is not a single word’s meaning but a whole mode of meaning: the layering of description, judgment, and foreshadowing that the English reader experiences as a single, unsettling impression.
Section 4: The Translator Carries More Than Meaning
The examples above illustrate a broader pattern: in each case, the resistance to translation is not linguistic but cultural. The problem is not a lack of vocabulary, but the mistaken assumption that meaning can be fully transferred from one language to another. Words resist translation because the meanings they carry are embedded within particular forms of life, shaped by specific histories, social practices, and cultural expectations. The translator may reproduce part of that meaning, but never entirety of the world from which it emerges.
Section 5: The Translator’s Cultural Horizon
The importance of cultural competence in translation has been widely discussed in the literature, yet it remains central to the experience of many multilingual translators. The translator working between languages that are not their first is not merely moving words but moving between worlds, and sometimes those worlds are in conflict. This experience, I suspect, is not unique to any one translator or any one language pair but is, on my reading, a condition of translation itself, for every translator working across cultural boundaries — particularly across cultures with divergent norms of directness, formality, or emotional expression — will encounter moments where the text demands something that feels like a betrayal, not of the text, not of the author, but of the translator’s own cultural self. Translation is often imagined as the movement of meaning across linguistic boundaries. Yet translators do not cross the boundaries alone. They bring with them their own cultural assumptions, emotional responses, and interpretive habits. In this sense, translation involves not only the movement of texts but also the movement of selves.
Conclusion: What Cannot Be Carried — and Why That Matters
Benjamin teaches us that translation transforms the original rather than reproducing it. Constant reminds us that translators themselves participate in this transformation. The examples examined here suggest that untranslatability emerges not simply because languages differ, but because meaning is inseparable from the cultural worlds in which it is produced and interpreted. Translation therefore reveals both the limits of language and the limits of our own perspectives. Yet these limits are precisely what make translation valuable, inviting us to encounter forms of life that can never be entirely reduced to our own.
Han Wang is an undergraduate student in the Bachelor of Arts at the University of Queensland, majoring in French Advanced, English and Spanish. Her work explores the limits and possibilities of translation, with a particular interest in what is gained, lost, and transformed when literature moves between languages. She hopes to explore how language shapes our ability to communicate, understand one another, and encounter worlds beyond our own, while advocating for a greater appreciation of the humanities and the enduring importance of language.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of The Translator.” In Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1968.
Constant, Benjamin. Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments. Liberty Fund: 2003.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Seabury Press, 1975.
Slatter, Angela. “Ash.” The Sourdough Posts. 22 May 2015. https://www.angelaslatter.com/the-sourdough-posts-ash/.
[1] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations (Schocken Books 1986), 72.
[2] Angela Slatter, “Ash,” The Sourdough Posts, 22 May 2015, https://www.angelaslatter.com/the-sourdough-posts-ash/. Italics in original.
[3] Angela Slatter, “Ash,” The Sourdough Posts, 22 May 2015, https://www.angelaslatter.com/the-sourdough-posts-ash/.
Featured Image: August Macke, At the Garden Table, oil on canvas, 1914.
