untranslatable

On the sculptured stones in the Copan valley there are characters which seem to resemble very ancient writing, but this pictographic writing is largely untranslatable.

The man who had disappeared returned suddenly on the opposite side to that by which he had left; he made a sign with his head to the sentinel, who, turning to the boat, said, "S'accommodi." The Italian s'accommodi is untranslatable; it means at once, "Come, enter, you are welcome; make yourself at home; you are the master." It is like that Turkish phrase of Moliere's that so astonished the bourgeois gentleman by the number of things implied in its utterance.

With what stupendous and untranslatable coolness he says this, and how loungingly he leads on to the women's side: making, as he goes, a kind of iron castanet of the key and the stair-rail!

*This is quite untranslatable -- it being a play upon the words pecheur, a sinner, and pecheur, a fisherman.

Learn the subtleties of their untranslatable art of diffident irony.

Croft, an author and translator by profession, proves fascinated with words, especially those that are untranslatable without lived experience to vivify them.

D.'s translation of Euripides' Hippolytus, untranslatable women: Laura Riding's classical modernist fiction, and Ireland's Oedipus and the modernism of W.

In addition to experiments with puns, syntax, and neologisms, her work contained a multitude of subtle cultural, scientific, and mythological references--and had largely been deemed untranslatable for these very reasons.

Chants of "Mo-lod-tsy" - an almost untranslatable word of praise and thanks that roughly means "Good job, guys" - echoed across the dark streets of Moscow and other cities.

Some of the best words are untranslatable. In German, fernweh means the yearning for a place one has never been.