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A whole current of thought has recently— and rightly—returned to the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt on languages as unique “visions of the world” (“Weltanschauungen”). It is because each language divides up the universe in its own way that the untranslatable may well be the fundamental characteristic of any translation, since no word corresponds exactly to any other word in another language. This idea, although not inherently wrong, needs to be completed. There are other ways of accounting for untranslatability; otherwise there would be no reason why, in the same language, a word can change its meaning with the times in which it is used. Finally, linguistic structures are not rigid: they are, on the contrary, extremely malleable. This is what we show from our analysis of the semantic field of the two words meaning Freedom in Russian, “svoboda” and “volja,” the latter being often qualified as untranslatable.