The real problem, imho.

You enter the text and select which language you are translating from and which language you are translating to. And then you get something that mildly resembles the original meaning of the text.

On the Splendid Ezine website, there is mention of a pastime of the “Extremely Bored” called Babelizing. This involves translating a piece of text with Systran’s Translator (which powers Altavista’s translator) and then repeatedly retranslating the text backwards and forwards between languages until you get something that is almost, but not entirely, unlike the original text.

For example:

The lyrics to “There She Goes” by The La’s

Before: “There she goes, there she goes again, racing thru my brain. And I just can’t contain this feeling that remains.”

After: “Here it goes, here still it goes and disc battery through my brain. It continues being and the ordered uniform then not to contain this sensitivity, that one.”

Linguists are still unsure how the lexicon functions, but it seems to be a complex sort of mental filing system that stores words and their meanings.

We can describe any object, being or concept with varying degrees of accuracy using words, but without the sensory experience of that thing, or the life experience to process the concept, there is nothing more than words.

What are the concepts themselves that remain beyond the jurisdiction of language?

Whatever those concepts are, language is a way in which we can describe and refer to them - but the concepts themselves remain outside the binding of language.