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, he argued that language is a system of differences in which each sign has value only in relation to others. A sign, for Saussure, is composed of a signifier and a signified, and their bond is arbitrary and conventional.

It follows from this that words in one language do not map cleanly onto those of another, because every linguistic system organizes concepts differently. Saussure illustrates this with the difficulty of translating his own key terms—langue, langage, and parole:

“Ainsi en allemand Sprache veut dire ‘langue’ et ‘langage’; Rede correspond à peu près à ‘parole’, mais y ajoute le sens spécial de ‘discours’... Aucun mot ne correspond exactement à l’une des notions précisées plus haut; c’est pourquoi toute définition faite à propos d’un mot est vaine; c’est une mauvaise méthode que de partir des mots pour définir les choses.” (Saussure, 1916, p. 35)

Saussure cautions his students against assuming direct equivalence between such terms as langue, langage, and parole across languages. In German and Latin, he observes, no single word corresponds precisely to these notions. Attempting to define concepts by means of individual words is methodologically flawed, because meaning depends on the relational structure of each linguistic system.

Thus, the incompatibility of languages is structural, not accidental: each system divides conceptual space differently. Translation can never be exact, for meaning is not a transferable property but a product of differential relations within a system. To define through words is to fall into the illusion that they possess inherent meanings; in truth, meaning exists only by virtue of position and contrast.

Derrida and the Deconstruction of Meaning

Several decades later, Jacques Derrida would radicalize Saussure’s insight. For him, meaning is not only relational but also never fully present. His neologism différance, combining the senses of difference and deferral, designates the endless play in which signs refer to other signs without reaching a final ground.

This logic underlies his reflections in the 1983 Letter to a Japanese Friend, where he confronts the problem of translating the very word deconstruction. His correspondent had asked for a Japanese equivalent, and Derrida replies by exposing the illusion that any word could carry a fixed meaning across linguistic boundaries. He warns:

“All sentences of the type ‘deconstruction is X’ or ‘deconstruction is not X’ a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false.” (Derrida, 1983)

This statement applies not only to deconstruction but to language itself. Every word derives its sense from contextual substitutions within a system, never from a stable essence. “The word ‘deconstruction,’ like all other words, acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions,” Derrida writes—a formulation that generalizes Saussure’s structural insight but strips it of any resting point.

Derrida insists that translation is not a secondary act performed on an original text:

“I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derived event in relation to an original language or text.”
Meaning is always already in translation, continually displaced from one sign to another. The impossibility of exact equivalence is not a flaw but the very condition of language.

He also describes translation as a creative event rather than a mechanical transfer of meaning. “Deconstruction takes place, it deconstructs itself,” he notes—a formulation (ça se déconstruit) that captures the reflexive movement of language undoing its own constructions. Translation, too, “takes place” without a controlling subject; it is an occurrence within language itself, where each new context reshapes what was thought to be the same. For that reason, Derrida likens translation to poetry:

“I clearly understand translation as involving the same risk and chance as the poem.” (ibid.)

To translate, for Derrida, is to expose meaning to chance, to let it become something other than itself. The translator does not reproduce an origin but participates in the unfolding of difference. In this sense, translation is both impossible and necessary, an operation that reveals the perpetual mobility of meaning.

Convergences and Divergences

Both thinkers challenge the illusion of fixed meaning. Saussure shows that significance arises from a system of internal differences; Derrida extends this into the temporal and philosophical domain, arguing that no system can contain the play of difference it generates. Where Saussure describes language as a structure of relations, Derrida reveals that this structure is always already in motion, undermining its own stability.

For Saussure, translation fails because each language partitions conceptual space in its own way. For Derrida, it fails, and must fail, because meaning itself is never complete. Yet this failure is not a loss but an opening: the site where language continues to produce new sense. Translation, like writing, becomes an act of invention, not reproduction.

Conclusion: Embracing the Risk of Language

The difficulty of translation lies at the very heart of linguistic meaning. Saussure and Derrida both show that no expression can be carried intact from one language to another because meaning depends on difference, context, and substitution. More radically, Derrida teaches that this instability is not confined to translation between idioms but operates within every act of signification.

To translate, therefore, is not merely to seek equivalence but to negotiate the movement of meaning—to risk creation, transformation, and loss. As Derrida concludes, “another word (the same word and another) can be found in Japanese… to speak of deconstruction, and to lead elsewhere to its being written and transcribed, in a word which will also be more beautiful.” Translation, like poetry, bears the same risk and the same promise: that in crossing boundaries, language becomes what it is: a ceaseless play of difference without origin or end.

References

• Derrida, Jacques. Letter to a Japanese Friend. 10 July 1983.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
• Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Lausanne: Payot, 1916.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931–35.