Sources

This dashboard is internal. It tracks phrases that do not travel cleanly in the owner’s sites (Krazy To-Go Box, Causative Cooking, The Pile) and in the Gutenberg German pass. Menu-chat and roadmap entries stay on the matrix under Other. Phrasebank keeps phrasings that do travel.

Stance

An untranslatable here is a symptom of difference, not a ban on translating. Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables treats the untranslatable as what one never ceases (not) to translate. The matrix marks four packagings with a shape and a grey, never with colour alone: a word, grammar, a lost connotation, or reordering. A dash means that cell is not yet recorded. Nothing here is a medical claim.

Editions

The entries grew from Grant Golland’s project notes, including a menu-translation chat and a roadmap that sorts loss into structural, semantic, pragmatic, and aesthetic kinds. Project page: Map of Untranslatability.

Literary research notes in this repository quote short passages from Project Gutenberg editions. Those quotations stay in the notes; this site does not reproduce them. Credit the editions named there:

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil, Gutenberg #2229. English by Bayard Taylor, Gutenberg #14591.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Gutenberg #2407. English by R. Dillon Boylan, Gutenberg #2527.
• Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, Gutenberg #77182. English by Theodore Martin, Gutenberg #2782.
• Heinrich Heine, Buch der Lieder, Gutenberg #3498. English by Edgar Alfred Bowring, Gutenberg #52882.
• Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung, Gutenberg #22367. English by David Wyllie, Gutenberg #5200, distributed under the Project Gutenberg license.

Japanese and French lines in those research notes are original proposals, not Gutenberg text. Dutch was left out of that pass on purpose.

Japanese wording was checked against open dictionaries, not copied into this catalog. EDRDG JMdict, KANJIDIC, and WWWJDIC are Creative Commons Attribution–ShareAlike 4.0. Attribute them, and leave them under that license, if you redistribute their data. This site does not ship those files. WWWJDIC: edrdg.org.

License

Original notes in this repository, and the wording of these pages, are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. Cited dictionaries keep CC BY-SA. Gutenberg editions keep the Project Gutenberg license. The historical English translations named above are the public-domain texts cited in the research notes, except David Wyllie’s English Metamorphosis, which is modern and stays under the Gutenberg license.

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