https://aethermug.com/posts/is-there-anything-untranslatable
fitting native word simply doesn't exist that works as well as the foreign one in that situation. I often have conversations like this:
Marco: I'm looking for a date spot, have you been to that restaurant before?
Friend: yes, it's great.
M: nice and cozy?
F: yeah, especially very... shibui.
M: perfect, she'll love it then.
Shibui (渋い) means, in this context, quietly refined in an austere way, without pretenses, almost stoic. Saying shibui like that, in a mere second, conveys what would otherwise make a clunky and unnecessarily long digression.
Perhaps the most famous story about translation in Japan is an urban legend featuring Natsume Souseki, considered by many to be the greatest Japanese novelist of the early 20th century.
When he wasn't writing future classics, he worked as an English teacher. One day—the story goes—his students were trying to translate the English phrase "I love you" to Japanese. They knew the translation for each of those three words, so naturally they constructed a grammatically valid sentence with them. How hard can it be?
When they asked Souseki to check their translation, however, he told them they'd gotten it all wrong.
"Japanese lovers don't say things straight to each other's face like that," he said. "You'll do better to translate it as, isn't the moon beautiful tonight?"
The story itself may be apocryphal, but the message rings true. There is a side of translation that has less to do with the meaning of individual words than with the intention of the speaker. You forgo a literal translation in favor of one that uses different words, but achieves the intended meaning more closely. This approach—usually called "free translation"—exists for all languages, but it's especially important when the two languages in question are very different. Japanese (to/from) translators are forced to do this kind of work all the time.
When a surgeon turns to her assistant and says “Scalpel,” this one-word linguistic act—we might call it a command or a request—is, first and foremost, an instruction for mutual coordination. The key to understanding this is that when you use language, you are never just saying something. You are doing something. With words, you act on those around you, to help them, influence them, build affiliations with them.
— Language vs Reality, Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists, Nick Enfield
Translation is achieving the goals of the original text in a different language.
