Here's a fun exercise. Take the word "freedom" and translate it into another language. Simple enough—except the French liberté carries revolutionary overtones, the German Freiheit has different philosophical roots, and the Russian svoboda emerged from an entirely different political tradition. Each translation quietly smuggles in assumptions that reshape what you think the original meant.

This is one of the sneakiest traps in historical research. Most of history was not written in your language. Every time a historian translates a source, they're making interpretive choices—and sometimes those choices go spectacularly wrong, creating misunderstandings that ripple through centuries of scholarship. If you want to read history critically, you need to understand how language itself can lead you astray.

Consider the ancient Greek word arete. You'll find it translated as "virtue" in most English editions of Plato and Aristotle. Seems straightforward. But arete didn't mean moral goodness the way "virtue" suggests to modern ears. It meant something closer to "excellence"—being the best possible version of something. A fast horse had arete. A sharp knife had arete. Translate it as "virtue" and suddenly the Greeks sound like they spent all their time debating moral philosophy when they were actually arguing about what excellence looks like.

This isn't a minor academic quibble. That single translation choice shaped how entire generations of scholars understood Greek ethics. It made ancient Greek thought appear far more compatible with Christian morality than it actually was—a very convenient reading for medieval and early modern translators who had their own theological reasons for wanting that alignment.

The same problem haunts the Arabic word jihad. Routinely translated as "holy war," its primary meaning is "struggle" or "striving"—often an internal, spiritual effort. That one translation choice has probably done more to distort Western understanding of Islamic intellectual history than any deliberate propaganda campaign. One wrong word, repeated long enough, stops looking like a choice and starts looking like a fact.

Takeaway

A mistranslation doesn't just change a word—it changes the questions you think a culture was asking. When you inherit someone else's translation, you inherit their interpretation without realizing you've made a choice at all.

Some concepts don't just lose nuance in translation—they have no equivalent in the target language at all. The Chinese concept of li (禮) is usually translated as "ritual" or "propriety," but neither captures what it actually meant. Li encompassed proper behavior, social harmony, cosmic order, and the correct performance of everything from state ceremonies to greeting your neighbor on the street. Calling it "ritual" makes Confucian thought sound obsessed with empty formalities, which is almost the opposite of its point.

The Roman pietas pulls the same trick in reverse. We get our word "piety" from it, which makes us think of religious devotion. But Roman pietas meant duty—to the gods, yes, but equally to your family, your ancestors, and the state, all at once and inseparably. When Virgil calls Aeneas pius, he's not saying the man was devout. He's saying Aeneas carried the weight of every obligation a Roman could possibly imagine on his shoulders.

These aren't translation failures in the usual sense. The problem isn't that translators chose the wrong word—it's that no right word exists. These concepts belonged to worlds organized around assumptions about society, nature, and human relationships that modern English simply never needed vocabulary for. When a concept doesn't exist in your language, you literally cannot think it without learning the original term on its own terms.

Takeaway

Recognizing that an idea is untranslatable is itself a breakthrough. It means you've stopped projecting your own categories onto the past and started seeing a genuinely different way of organizing the world.

So how do historians dig beneath misleading translations to recover what words originally meant? The first tool is contextual analysis—studying how a word was actually used across many different sources rather than trusting a dictionary definition. If you want to understand what medieval libertas meant, you don't look it up. You read fifty charters, petitions, and legal disputes where people invoked it, fought over it, and defined it against competing terms. The pattern of usage tells you what no dictionary can.

The second approach is examining what a word was contrasted with. Languages reveal meaning through opposition. If Romans contrasted libertas with servitus (servitude), that tells you something very different than if they contrasted it with licentia (license or excess). The enemies of a concept reveal as much about its meaning as any positive definition ever could.

Finally, historians track how words change over time. The English word "nice" meant "foolish" in the thirteenth century, "precise" in the sixteenth, and "pleasant" by the eighteenth. Every historical term has a similar biography. Tracing when a word shifted, why it shifted, and what was gained or lost—that's painstaking detective work. But it's the difference between understanding what a source actually communicated and unconsciously reading your own assumptions back into the past.

Takeaway

Don't trust the dictionary—trust the context. A word's real meaning lives not in its translation but in how people actually used it, argued about it, and defined it against alternatives they rejected.

Every translation is an argument wearing the disguise of a neutral act. The next time you encounter a historical text in translation, remember that someone chose every significant word—and those choices shaped what you're able to think about the past before you even started reading.

You don't need to learn ancient Greek to read history well. But developing a healthy suspicion of translated terms—pausing to ask what did this actually mean to them?—is where reading history like a historian begins.