I was six months into a Tamil novel when I lost eleven days to a single sentence. The sentence had a word in it that gets called untranslatable in the sort of article that collects such words — one of those terms that supposedly encodes a whole worldview. It took me about four minutes. I used three English words and a comma and it is fine; anyone reading it in English understands exactly what is meant, and if the original is richer, so is every word in every language, which is why we have footnotes and why nobody reads them.
What cost me eleven days was the verb.
In the sentence, a woman speaks to her husband's older brother. In Tamil the verb she uses does an enormous amount of work before it says anything about the action: it establishes that she is younger, that he outranks her in the household, that the relation is formal but not cold, and that this is the register she has always used with him and would be shocking to break. Not one of those things is stated. All of them are grammatically obligatory. She could not have said the sentence without saying them.
English verbs encode none of it. Not deference, not age, not household position, not the temperature of a relationship. The verb goes in bare. So the translator stands there holding four pieces of information that arrived free in the original and must now be either thrown away or paid for — and paid for out of a budget the author never had to spend, in words the author never wrote, in a sentence that will now be longer and slower and slightly explanatory in a way the Tamil is not.
This is the actual difficulty of translating from any Indian language into English, and I have never seen it in a list of untranslatable words, because it is not a word. It is the fact that every sentence in Tamil or Hindi or Malayalam has already told you where everybody stands, and every sentence in English has to be persuaded to.
The consequences show up as a kind of flatness that English-language readers of Indian fiction sometimes complain about without being able to locate. They say the dialogue feels stiff, or oddly formal, or that everyone sounds the same. Usually they are reading a translator who chose to preserve the hierarchy — with an honorific, a "sir", an elaborated clause — and the preservation is what reads as stiff, because in English the marked choice is to mention rank, and in Tamil the marked choice is to omit it. Faithfulness in one direction produces distortion in the other, and there is no third option where the sentence is just carried across.
Now the objection, which is strong and which I have made against colleagues. English is not actually helpless here. It has address terms, contractions, syntax, rhythm, the whole apparatus of class and region that an English novelist deploys without effort. A skilled translator can put the hierarchy into who interrupts whom, into whether she finishes her sentences, into the difference between "I did" and "I did, yes". Claiming untranslatability is very often a way of not having worked hard enough, and the untranslatable-word article is the industrialised form of that excuse — it flatters the source language and asks nothing of the translator.
I accept the objection almost entirely. I want to add only that the machinery English offers is not free either. Every one of those solutions is a characterisation. If I make her hesitate, I have made her a hesitant person; the Tamil verb made her a younger sister-in-law, which is a fact about the room and not about her personality. I have swapped a structural fact for a psychological one, and English readers, who are trained by their own novels to read hesitation as interiority, will build a character out of my workaround.
I did it anyway. On day eleven I gave her a small stumble at the start of the sentence and moved on, and it works, and I have reread it perhaps thirty times since, and what I think now is that the English woman in my book is slightly more nervous than the Tamil one and there is nothing I can do about it.
A reviewer in Chennai noticed. She wrote that the translation was good and that the sister-in-law was more timid than in the original, which she attributed to interpretation. It was not interpretation. It was a verb.
Tibetan does the same thing with verbs of speech and it defeats every translator I have worked with. The register is not decoration on the sentence, it is the sentence's account of the room.