Whorf’s concept of linguistic relativity was subjected to severe criticism from scholars of language, culture and psychology.

• Eric Lennenberg, Noam Chomsky, Steven Pinker have criticized Whorf for failing to be sufficiently clear in his formulation of how language influences thought, and for failing to provide real evidence to support his assumptions. Generally Whorf's arguments took the form of examples that were anecdotal or speculative, and functioned as attempts to show how "exotic" grammatical traits were connected to what were considered equally exotic worlds of thought.

 

Noam Chomsky’s

In Chomsky's view, every phrase, before being formulated, is conceived as a deep structure in our mind.

His theory, therefore, postulates the existence of elementary, universal conceptual constructions, common to all mankind. Interlingual translation (and intralingual translation, too) is always possible, according to Chomsky, because logical patterns underlying the natural languages are uniform constants. If a speaker actualizes a deep structure in some way, it can also be expressed in another language.

• P.V. Chesnokov (П.В. Чесноков) criticized the concept of linguistic relativity as “based on failure to distinguish between logic forms (logic system of thought) and semantic forms (logic system)… logic system is the same in all people, because it comes from the nature of human cognition” (1977, 56).

 

Semantic differences between languages do not create insurmountable barrier for interlingual communication and for translation (A. Schweizer).

If in each language everything what is implied may be expressed, so, everything what is expressed in one language may be translated into another language (W. Koller).

 

Peeter Torop proposes to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a book. Since a translated text, in its practical life, takes on the form of a publication, the parts that are untranslatable within the text "can be 'translated' in the commentary, in the glossary, in the preface, in the illustrations (maps, drawings, photographs) and so on“ (2000, 129).

• Torop sais, that one of “translation activities is to support (ideally) the struggle against cultural neutralization, leveling neutralization, the cause, in many societies, on one hand, of indifference toward cultural "clues" of the author or the text (above all in multiethnic nations) and, on the other hand, to stimulate the search for national identity or cultural roots” (2000, 129-130).

 

Neutralization of the linguistic context is another side of translatability

• Among contemporary translators, for instance, there would seem to be a marked tendency towards modernization and naturalization of the linguistic context, paired with a similar but less clear tendency towards in the same direction in regard to the literary intertext, but an opposing tendency towards historicizing and exoticizing in the socio-cultural situation (J.S. Holmes 1988, 49).

 

Which elements of the text are untranslatable (or almost untranslatable)?

• Dialecticisms

• Play on words

• Meaning of names

• Metalinguistic elements

• Anecdotal plots with implicit variants of meaning

All these cases are deviations from the standard language.

 

Dialecticisms

• They are used for characteristics of some groups of people.

How to translate dialecticisms?

1. To replace the dialect elements of TL with the dialect of SL (if their literary functions coincide). For example, in some English translations of Aristophan’s comedies the Dorian dialect of Greek (in contrast to the “high” Attic dialect) is substituted with the Scottish dialect of English.

2. To use the substandard speech or vocabulary in TT instead of the dialecticisms of ST. In the Russian translation of Aristophan (by A. Piotrovsky) just the substandard vocabulary is used for the Dorian dialect.

 

Mark Twain in his Introduction to “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”:

“In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary? "Pike-County" dialect; and four modified varieties of the last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work, but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech”.

In the Ukrainian translation of the novel (by Iryna Steshenko, 1898-1987) just substandard vocabulary is used for rendering of these dialectical elements.

 

Play on words (pun)

In the novel of William Thackeray “Vanity Fair” the phrase of Rebecca “It is a false note!” has double meaning: she was playing a piano (a false note in melody) and stopped to throw out a note from Rawdon Crawley to a fireplace (a false note in relationships).

In both Ukrainian (by O. Senyuk) and Russian (by M. Diakonov) this phrase is translated as «Фальшива нота» / «Фальшивая нота», what does not render the word play and associative meaning.

Proposed translation: «Фальшива нота-нотатка» (Ukrainian bothe «нота» and «нотатка» coincide with English “note”)