Translatability is one way Benjamin’s Task of the Translator considers a work’s life across languages. The issue is not merely whether another language can make it understandable. Translation belongs to the original work’s historical continuation and transformation.
Benjamin does not evaluate translation solely by information transfer or ease of comprehension. Languages differ in ways of intending, not only in vocabulary. An exhaustive list of word equivalents cannot therefore explain their relation.
Retranslating a poem at different historical moments is more than correcting earlier errors. The translating language changes and the work acquires new conditions of reception. Translation participates in this continuing life.
Pure language does not designate an easily usable language above existing languages. The essay’s philosophical and theological emphases should not become literal technical instructions. Its translatability is not the same kind of measurable property as a contemporary machine-translation score.