The thing with &quot;untranslatable&quot; words is that their perfectly translatable, but the connotations surrounding them are completely different. What untranslatable then means in this context is that the listener of the translated version will &#x2F;not&#x2F; understand the same meaning as someone listening to the non-translated version.<p>For instance, while the literal translation of shouganai is &quot;it can&#x27;t be helped,&quot; I&#x27;ll translate it as &quot;shit happens&quot; in one situation, or &quot;that&#x27;s bureaucracy for you&quot; (among other things) in another, depending on context. There simply isn&#x27;t a reliable equivalent.<p>Also, imagine a scene (one that occurs every day at the end of my restaurant shift) where everyone is saying &quot;otsukare&quot; to each other. How should I translate that? Should I just have people yelling &quot;TIRED&quot; to the room? I&#x27;d have translated the word &#x27;correctly&#x27; but not actually reflected the general feeling of &quot;wow, we did it bro. Good job&quot;<p>I&#x27;m currently learning Japanese. As I&#x27;ve learned these &#x27;untranslatable words&#x27; of course I learned them through dictionaries and English explanations. As I saw them used and used them myself, though, they came to mean something different. I had to develop a new concept to compile them to, as it were. Now I find them difficult to translate back to English, and instead they have become new words in my vocabulary. It&#x27;s why pigeon languages happen. (you should see the English spoken in the English-speaking office I worked at. It&#x27;s stolen many Japanese words)