Une vigne peut-elle vivre en Norvège?

This article raises the question of untranslatability on different levels: in general, for a specific text into a specific language and for a certain stylistic means called animism. Animism has been defined in different manners in a large number of scientific disciplines, but all definitions have in common that attributes of the livings are given to dead objects. A study conducted with Think-aloud protocols (TAPs) set out to verify whether a certain number of hypotheses about animisms were well known among translators and non translators of French into Norwegian. Eight subjects were given the task to translate a short French text into Norwegian meanwhile thinking aloud. The subjects were not aware of the goal of the experiment. It was still found that many of them verbalised thoughts that can be related to the animism issue and the question of untranslatability.