This is a nitpick, but linguists today believe that there is no such thing as an untranslatable word. It might not be able to be translated quite as nicely or poetically, and a single word translation will not bring across the full connotation and denotation, but the translation still exists in any natural language. Often you will read articles talking about an “untranslatable word” and then translate it in the next sentence, like https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-translation-anjana-iyer/ (the first DuckDuckGo result for “untranslatable word”). I agree with your concept of some ideas being unable to be understood without context though.
I guess this is a matter of opinion on how much explanation makes something “untranslatable”. For example, maybe it takes 1000 words to give enough context to adequately convey the meaning of a word with a very precise meaning in another language. Is this word “translatable”? In a certain sense no, because making sense of it required giving the person a lot of new context that they didn’t have before such that they could make sense of it that was beyond simple reference to existing concepts they had. Obviously the other end of the spectrum where there are words that are literally impossible to explain don’t exist or else even the speakers of the same language wouldn’t be able to convey their meaning to each other, so it seems to me fair to say some words are untranslatable if by that we mean unable to provide a direct or simple translation on the order of using something up to the size of a phrase to capture the original meaning of the word.
This is a nitpick, but linguists today believe that there is no such thing as an untranslatable word. It might not be able to be translated quite as nicely or poetically, and a single word translation will not bring across the full connotation and denotation, but the translation still exists in any natural language. Often you will read articles talking about an “untranslatable word” and then translate it in the next sentence, like https://www.boredpanda.com/untranslatable-words-found-in-translation-anjana-iyer/ (the first DuckDuckGo result for “untranslatable word”). I agree with your concept of some ideas being unable to be understood without context though.
I guess this is a matter of opinion on how much explanation makes something “untranslatable”. For example, maybe it takes 1000 words to give enough context to adequately convey the meaning of a word with a very precise meaning in another language. Is this word “translatable”? In a certain sense no, because making sense of it required giving the person a lot of new context that they didn’t have before such that they could make sense of it that was beyond simple reference to existing concepts they had. Obviously the other end of the spectrum where there are words that are literally impossible to explain don’t exist or else even the speakers of the same language wouldn’t be able to convey their meaning to each other, so it seems to me fair to say some words are untranslatable if by that we mean unable to provide a direct or simple translation on the order of using something up to the size of a phrase to capture the original meaning of the word.