In every linguistics class I've ever taken (all two of them), the professors have been quick to point out that anything you can say in one language, you express that exact same idea in any other language. But, yeah, doing it gracefully, not so much. So you do end up losing some of the details. Anytime I see a translation that isn't clunky as hell, I'm kinda insanely curious what the person actually said, because you just know something was lost in translation.