Full Idea
The firmer the direct links of a sentence with non-verbal stimulation, the less drastically its translations can diverge from one another from manual to manual.
Gist of Idea
The firmer the links between sentences and stimuli, the less translations can diverge
Source
Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §07)
Book Reference
Quine,Willard: 'Word and Object' [MIT 1969], p.27
A Reaction
This implies (plausibly) that talk about farming will have fairly determinate translations into foreign languages, but talk of philosophy will not. An interesting case is logic, where we might expect tight translation with little non-verbal stimulation.