But just because it's "untranslatable" from, say, Chinese to English, doesn't mean that we can't see many Chinese-Chinese co occurrences of the word, so this Chinese word would still have a vector of significance relative to other Chinese words, right?

That is- if you ran word2vec on a Chinese corpus, this word would be represented adequately in the vectorspace.

Wouldn't it then make sense, if you could find a proper mapping from one language's space to the other (I don't know if this part is realistic, but maybe by finding correspondences between already-translated words), that this word would not land in a bizarre spot were it to be expressed as a combination of vectors from the other language?