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wiresnips comments on Epilogue: Atonement (8/8) - Less Wrong
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Untranslatable 2 is the thought sharing sex.
Untranslatable 1 is confusion or distress. Untranslatable 3 is intellegence enhancing drugs. Untranslatable 4 is forced happy via untranslatable 2, possibly happy drugs refined from the chemical process of it. Untranslatable 5 is wisdom inherited from gene-thoughts.
if you can translate them, they're hardly untranslatable
Really? In that case, please translate the word "naches" from Yiddish to English in one word.
How about "naches"? English: "Why translate when you can steal?"
"pleasure"
The level of translation they were using wasn't all that fancy. They certainly had worse translations than that.
Easy: contentment.
Contentment is insufficient, because it's a specific flavor of contentment, isn't it?
There are many examples of this scenario, both in fact and fiction; an untranslatable word so laden with connotation that it cannot effectively be replaced. Usually, these words represent some core value of their society of origin (reference: the Dwarves' Super-Honor in Eragon). In a way, the fact that they cannot be translated helps convey their meaning, showing their importance and giving them a quality of both simpleness and complexity, as if your brain was meant to have a word for them, as if they were simply a basic part of the universe falling into place. It's a beautiful thing, really.
The problem isn't quite so much "they can be translated" as... to translate them, you need to pause and first explain the concept. There is no existing conceptual token, phrase, meme, word or other sort of direct translation of the message for these Untranslatables, at least in the fiction, because their speaker did not explain them, they simply used the token.
The translation software (presumably) does not understand this stuff, and will not create new explanations where none was given by the speaker it is attempting to translate (again, presumably). For this, you would (presumably) require some form of powerful AI rather than complex algorithms - and the story preamble explicitly declares that AI never worked. I'm assuming this remained true for the other species.