Very common from the beginning of the 19th c.
1655. Fuller, Ch. Hist., V. v. § 36. Some few [words] untranslatable, without losse of life or lustre.
1694. Gracian’s Courtier’s Oracle, A 3 b. The French Author … counts him unintelligible, and by consequence untranslatable.
1742. Gray, Lett., II. 28. Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics:… To me they appear untranslatable.
1811. Coleridge, Table-t. (1835), II. 353. The excellence of verse, he said, was to be untranslatable into any other words.
1880. T. Hodgkin, Italy & Inv., I. ii. I. 193. The untranslateable grandeur of Claudian’s epithet.
Hence Untranslatableness; -latably adv.
1817. Coleridge, Biogr. Lit., II. 160. The infallible test of a blameless style; namely, its untranslatableness in words of the same language without injury to the meaning.
1855. Smedley, Occult Sciences, 250. Concerning dreams—ut de accentibus somni—as he untranslatably styles them.
1889. Athenæum, 16 Nov., 671/1. The ugly proceedings untranslatably known as brique.
