Despite popular claims to the contrary, I don’t believe that anything is truly untranslatable. In fact, I’d even say that proper nouns can be translated too—just look at Pokémon names in different regions, or any “Anglicised” surname.
Anyway, I thought I’d make a list of some fairly common but nevertheless tricky metaphors that come up in my work from time to time. It’s easy enough to paraphrase or reframe metaphors, but it can be hard to express them succinctly. At other times, the client might want a metaphor to be expressed as literally as possible.
I hope to update this page now and then. I’ll probably just add new entries to the bottom and have them sitting here without any kind of organization or order.
Well, this is the metaphor that made me want to write this post in the first place. It comes up quite a lot in business documents aimed at investors and other texts that are designed to impress or inspire, because it evokes a vivid image of expansion from a zero-dimensional point to a one-dimensional line and then a two-dimensional plane. Each part of the phrase rhymes in Japanese as well, adding to the effect: ten, sen, men. The architect Kengo Kuma even used this metaphor for the title of a book, which was translated straightforwardly enough as Point Line Plane, as it happens.
There are two issues with this metaphor that make it hard to convey effectively and succinctly in English. Firstly, I feel that it is a lot more common in Japan, to the point of being virtually ubiquitous, while it is rare within English. The metaphor can lean on all the previous instances of its use within Japanese, but it has no such support within English and the reader or listener might not twig the meaning immediately. Secondly, if you stop at just two dimensions in English, you run the risk of the metaphor falling flat (sorry!!).
Obviously, the metaphor must be dealt with in a way that suits the context and any external requirements. If I had my way, I would aim to strip the actual terms of “points, lines, and planes” from the translation and instead shape the text so that the sense of expansion is conveyed effectively.
In exceptional circumstances, perhaps you could avoid the second issue above by extending the metaphor to three dimensions. But why stop at just three dimensions?
“At our company, we see the bigger picture. We connect individuals, weave a tapestry of connections, layer them like a luscious lasagne. But we don’t stop there—we go the extra mile by extending this belaboured metaphor into an intimately interconnected hypercube of synergetic activity.”
Ahem. Excuse me.
“Mister Bond, those are not the hands I had in mind…”
This one is far from ubiquitous, but it does appear fairly often in chemistry-related patents. It means a point on an atom or molecule at which a covalent bond can be formed—either a spare electron or a need for an electron. It’s close to the term “valency” but slightly different for moieties in need of an electron—something with a valency of 7 would have just one of these “bond hands”. This metaphor seems to be used fairly commonly in Japan’s education system, but I don’t recall any similar kind of description at school in the UK. It’s very easy to understand on a conceptual level, but it’s very hard to express succinctly in English. When I used to check patents, I’d opt for “bond point” but I’m still not satisfied with that translation.
By mojilove on 2025-11-13