Oxford dixit

Another interesting article in the Oxford Dictionaries Blog, Translatable vs untranslatable, and two brief quotes:

A lot of the coffee-break reads popping up on the internet don’t contain untranslatable words, but rather language lacking a word-for-word English equivalent. Is a translation only a translation if it is eloquent and succinct?

When moving from one language to another, what’s a translation and what’s a definition – and is there a difference? Brevity seems to matter: the longer the translation, the more likely it is to be considered a definition. Does this make it any less of a translation?