After reading what is mentioned above, one will easily find the fact that both the western and the Chinese translation theoreticians have the similar idea that there are actually many difficulties, even some untranslatable phenomena in translation practice.
But the history of translation for several thousand years and the fact that people can communicate with each other by translating are the powerful evidence of translatability.
Translatability or untranslatability is not a static result, but a transformable dynamic process. They are a dialectical unity of contradictory opposites. In nature, translatability includes the reflection on untranslatability and the latter embodies the admission of the former. They are inseparably interconnected.
Theoretically, there seems to be a basic channel connecting any two languages for message transferring. The role that the channel plays is crucial to make inter-lingual translation possible. On the one hand, no matter what language they speak, people in the world share the same forms of thought, namely, conception, inference, judgment, analysis or generalization, etc. All the normal forms of thought cannot be separated from these ones. Language is the output of thought. Though languages are different from one another in grammatical structures as well as other respects, they are open to change and ready for people to communicate with each other based on the constant elements of thought. So the identity of forms of thought guarantees the realization of inter-lingual translation. On the other hand, cultural permeability contributes to a more acceptable understanding for people of different languages. Language serves as a tool for social intercourse, which can make people from different cultures understand each other better, such as Chinese“饺子”, people are used to translating it as “dumplings”, but in fact“dumpling” is not equivalent with“饺子”. They do not refer to the same thing. Hence, Chinese transliterate“饺子” as“Jiaozi”. With more contacts between Chinese culture and western culture, nowadays, more and more foreigners accept “Jiaozi”. 从中美饮食文化的差异探究中餐菜名的可译性与不可译性(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_14435.html