[triclops200]

This article assumes that concepts are somehow precise coordinates within a single language; that's not the case, at best, speakers of a language mutually approximate a relatively consistent representation, but like, look at a word like yeet or whatever: we decided as a society on its meaning while it was being developed, as it were. Furthermore, it never rigorously defines what it means by translation. It claims 上京 is a single basis meaning moving to Tokyo, for example, but that isn't even an accurate translation: the individual components represent superior/greater/above and Tokyo and as an idiomatic phrase it represents the concept of moving to the capital for a better life. Something like "moving on up" or the like in some vernaculars of English, and idioms translating to idioms is a form of translation. It's disingenuous to represent the first concept as a single basis but not the second. Similarly, it claims mono no aware (物の哀れ) is unable to be translated, but, again, more literally "translated" is saying "the sorrow within things" character by character, and, only as an idiom has the full contextual understanding. It's not really a single point even if it's rather accurately located in a hypothetical embedding space by Japanese speakers. Imo, an English translation of the concept is "everything is dust in the wind", only 2 more individual conceptual units than the original Japanese phrase, and 3 of them are mainly just connecting words, but it's understood as a similar idiom/concept, here.

Concepts are only usefully distinguished by context and use.

By the author's own argumentation: nothing is translatable (or, generally, even communicatable) unless it has a fixed relative configuration to all other concepts that is precisely equivalent. In practice, we handle the fuzziness as part of communication and its useless to try and define a concept as untranslatable unless you're also of the camp that nothing is ever communicated (in which case, this response to the author's post is completely useless as nobody could possibly understand it enough internally for it to be useful. If you've read this far, congrats on squaring the circle somehow)

[DFHippie]

This. Two speakers of the same language only have approximately the same understanding of the meanings of the words they both use. Communication succeeds because we are constantly seeking and correcting misunderstandings that arise due to no two people speaking exactly the same language.

The same process that allows two speakers of the same language to communicate adequately allows one to translate from one language to another. If it were truly impossible to translate from one language to another, we would be unable to perceive this and argue about it. The recognition and correction of errors is part of the process of translation just as it is part of the process of communication in a single language.

[twalk4821]

Well said! To add on: if meaning is largely not "in" the words themselves, but embedded in a shared cognitive space, then in order to have a truly singular (ie "untranslatable") basis point would require positing unique cognitive mechanisms or some experiential quality that is unknown to members of the target language. But as you pointed out, most concepts do have an analogous representation in most languages, even if the tokens in use appear superficially different. And this is merely because the context in this case is a shared cognitive substrate (the low-level operating system, if you will) consisting of sense data, emotions, and so on, which in its fundamental operations does not substantially differ between members of the human race - or so I would argue. In either case, what matters seems to me to be not so much the actual tokens but the experiences or cognitive context in which they are embedded.