The only time you need more than one of the possible meanings at a time is when you want to make a pun. When translating, you'd have to explain both meanings, ruining the fun, but it's not a real barrier to expressing the content.
Do you think translating poetry (vs technical documentation) is easy?
Poetry is so often cultural, and deals why certain things like rhyme and meter which influences that. It can be translated easily - the hard part is trying to keep all the cultural connotations of a word and the structure of the poem.
Re:Our Language Affects What We See
by kingofhdds on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @08:18AM
(#19084983)
It really depends on one's knowledge/skill/experience in a particular field, so there's no "vs".
Do we? How do you explain the existance of words like "get", "fuck", "buffalo", "dharma", "karma", "tao", "таковам"?
Each of these have numerous meanings, which could individually be translatable in another language with very short phrases, but if you want to translate the general cluster you will need pages and pages in a dictionary I think ...