Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability
Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of transla...
| Authors | Jacob Bremerman, Brihi Joshi, Hirona Arai et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 June 2026 |
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