For example, Shakespeare is somewhat famously difficult to translate into French. Much of what's great about his writing is in the level of density he was able to achieve by playing with certain parts of English grammar's plasticity, and the strong rhythm he gets by playing with sounds. In French, it's easy enough to translate the meaning, but stricter rules about the use of articles and some characteristics of the language's word morphology make it really hard to achieve the same density, and differences in the phonology make it harder to achieve the same drumming rhythm.
Double meanings are also tricky. Different languages offer different opportunities for play with ambiguity, because they generally don't have the same patterns of polysemy.
In like with what the sibling commenter wrote, some languages appear to be more expressive than others. The English translator of the book The Last Temptation of Christ wrote about how difficult translating it from its original Greek was, due to the Greek language’s inherent multiple layers of meaning. He gave at least one example, which IIRC took him a few paragraphs to describe all the meaning wrapped up in one sentence, and said that most sentences in the book contained the same richness.
So, perhaps “cannot be translated correctly” is better understood to mean that you may have to read pages of footnotes to understand the full meaning of a small phrase. Some cultural constructs that its language relies on are even more deeply rooted, and nothing but a period of immersion in the culture itself will help you to understand it. “Cannot be translated correctly” seems like an adequate shorthand.
You must also take in account culture and other adjacent factors. I born in Colombia, and you don't imagine how HARD is to try to translate tech terms to Spanish.
Even where a "oficial" translation exist, use it could convey so much wrong ideas that I must use the spanglish version of it most of time (except if the translation is of COMMON use).
And the oposite. Is very funny when a foreigner come here and discover that not only need to know spanish, but also the "Colombian" variety and the "my city" variety too.
One funny? My brother (know english and work as mandarin translator) list to a foreign friend how many ways we say "hello!". Are DOZENS of it in use here! Several of them are INSULTS! You say an insult to other and we know when is a HELLO!
Nuts!
For example the saying in Estonian: "Keelan, käsen, poon ja lasen!" It's often used in the context of someone having too much power, but the tone of the saying is not formal compared to when people start to talk about the separation of the three powers. I suspect the joking/informal tone comes from the fact that the saying rhymes and has a nice rhythm. Direct translation of it, "I forbid, order, hang and shoot!" just doesn't pack the same punch or carry the same meaning because it's not just words that have to be translated. I think that's what people mean by saying "this cannot be translated correctly into your language".
Weltschmerz and Schadenfreude are examples where Germans have a wider net of associated concepts around it. To capture all of that, you would have to do more than translate it. For example, there is a commonly understood limit of what Schaden you can have Freude about, and what modifies that limit.
I find it fascinating how the existence or non-existence of certain concepts in a language influence our approaches at problem solving.
Anyone who speaks >1 languages is aware of this.
I call bullshit. Do you have any justification for this claim?
A common example is slavic мат. A repertoire of profanities that simply have no English translation, no equivalent, not even a meaningful loose translation/explanation. The best you can do is find the nearest approximate meaningful English construct, but it's a bit like projecting 3d space onto a 2d plane. You fundamentally lose information.
I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on. The fact that not all languages 1:1 map to each other especially when some classes of languages have fundamentally different constructs like gendered variants of every word, or the fact that some languages are more or less expressive, or the fact that English falls to the side of the less expressive scale. All 3 of these statements are trivial to verify with a couple google searches without even being a multilingual speaker.
And English being my strongest language, I'd say no, I don't think it's because I know it least well of the three.
Perhaps this is just something that doesn't make sense to people who only know one language, but it self-evident to multilinguals.
If you want a source, click TFA - a list of German expressions that don't exist in English. The discussion here on whether or not it's a great list, but no one disagrees there are phrases that don't exist in English.
Unless you can somehow prove that any English word or phrase have a direct German translation but not vice-versa.
[0]: https://www.science20.com/content/information_density_all_la...
What your are arguing is like jumping from "assembly is Turing complete, of course you can implement tail recursion" to "assembly is basically lisp" and that claiming otherwise "logically doesn't make sense". Sure, with lots of effort you can express anything in any language, but there are concepts which are much more easily and naturally expressed in any given language than another.
I’m sure any language can conjure up a similar feeling and combination of words. Maybe not a literal translation, but by virtue of being a human construct, any language can be crafted and molded into anything.