Is German “untranslatable?”

No, not unless you decide translation is impossible and every language is actually untranslatable.

But William Shirer mentions in his Berlin Diary that one Major Atkinson of the BBC did an English translation of Spengler’s Decline of the West that was “even better than the original — one of the few great translations from the German, an almost untranslatable language.”

What on earth would make German more untranslatable than any other language? Shirer doesn’t specify.

However, he does seem to have trouble with it himself. At one point in the book, he translates “Größenwahn” as “arch-madness” when it’s actually “megalomania.” And since I’m lucky enough to own a German-English dictionary printed in 1936, I double-checked and found “megalomania” there as well. Mr. Shirer probably mistook the noun “Größe” for the adjective “groß” and concluded the word meant a madness that is itself large, rather than a madness focused on enlargement.

So maybe “German is almost untranslatable” actually means “translating German is hard for me.”

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on him; after all, he had to spend years in Nazi Germany when he could have been assigned to some country with sunnier weather and less totalitarianism. He was probably just peeved. Which would explain entries like this:

“Struck by the ugliness of the German women on the streets and in restaurants and cafés. As a race they are certainly the least attractive in Europe. They have no ankles. They walk badly. They dress worse than English women used to. Off to Danzig tonight.”