There's one aspect that I think the article starts to hint at, but doesn't quite make the jump to is that words in a language just map to a subset of concepts that don't necessarily have the same subset boundaries in other languages.
If you think back to the meme from a decade or two ago about how men and women perceive colour [1], where e.g. "pink" to a man covers a whole range of colours to a woman, then that kind of hints at the idea.
One example back in the realm of vocabulary is the English word "happy". This embodies a range of meanings from joy, willingness, pleased, contentment, satiation, etc. There might be some overlap in some of these meanings with other words like "joy" or "excited", that don't have the same overlaps in other languages. E.g. "happy" might be translated to French as "heureuse" for the senses of pleased or content, but not for willingness sense.
Similarly, the French word "dommage" can be translated into a whole bunch of English words that aren't normally synonyms of each other - pity, damage, shame, harm.
This kind of nuance can lead to two opposite problems when translating - when the meaning is limited to a subset of possible meanings by context, and the wrong one is chosen in the foreign language, and when the author's meaning embodied multiple meanings and the chosen translation doesn't cover all of them.
Some of these features can lead to the humour in subtle jokes being lost in translation, e.g. "he'd be late to his own funeral".
If you think back to the meme from a decade or two ago about how men and women perceive colour [1], where e.g. "pink" to a man covers a whole range of colours to a woman, then that kind of hints at the idea.
One example back in the realm of vocabulary is the English word "happy". This embodies a range of meanings from joy, willingness, pleased, contentment, satiation, etc. There might be some overlap in some of these meanings with other words like "joy" or "excited", that don't have the same overlaps in other languages. E.g. "happy" might be translated to French as "heureuse" for the senses of pleased or content, but not for willingness sense.
Similarly, the French word "dommage" can be translated into a whole bunch of English words that aren't normally synonyms of each other - pity, damage, shame, harm.
This kind of nuance can lead to two opposite problems when translating - when the meaning is limited to a subset of possible meanings by context, and the wrong one is chosen in the foreign language, and when the author's meaning embodied multiple meanings and the chosen translation doesn't cover all of them.
Some of these features can lead to the humour in subtle jokes being lost in translation, e.g. "he'd be late to his own funeral".
[1] e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-babble/201504/... or https://digitalsynopsis.com/design/male-vs-female-color-perc...