Untranslatable Words: Saussure, Derrida, and the Impossibility of Translation

Letter to a Japanese Friend. AI image Introduction Translation appears, on the surface, to be a practical matter: finding equivalent terms in one language for those in another. Yet for two of the most influential thinkers on language in the twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida, this assumption conceals a deeper problem. Both argue, in different ways, that meaning is not a substance that words carry across linguistic borders. Rather, meaning is immanent to the structure of language itself: it arises from the relations among signs and is perpetually unstable. This article brings Saussure and Derrida into conversation to show why translation is always a risky, imperfect endeavor, and why that very imperfection reveals something essential about how language works. Language as a System: Saussure’s Insight In his Cours de linguistique générale (1916), Saussure proposed a radical new way of understanding language. Instead of viewing words as labels for things, h...