6. The politics of a word

The project’s charter asked it to examine the cultural politics of untranslatability claims: national-character mythology, exoticization, marketing. The genre’s own framing suggests a simple story — foreign words, romanticized by English speakers — and the project found that story true as far as it goes and incomplete in every direction. The claim that a word is untranslatable turns out to serve nationalists, publishers, tourist boards, novelists, and occasionally governments, and the sharpest critics of it are usually insiders.

Nationalism came first. The oldest untranslatability claim on the file is Portuguese and royal. King Duarte, who reigned in the 1430s, is credited with asserting saudade’s untranslatable singularity; the claim’s modern currency comes from Saudosismo, a nationalist literary movement founded in 1912 after the republican revolution, whose founder Teixeira de Pascoaes stated flatly that “the only people who feel saudade are the Portuguese.” That is not a linguistic observation; it is an ethnic-uniqueness assertion, and it sits uneasily beside the live scholarly possibility that the word derives from Arabic rather than Latin — a dispute the project’s source notes has identity-political weight of its own (saudade). The hygge-candle marketing that followed 2016 was a recent instance of a move that is centuries old.

The seller. The lifestyle wave is the genre’s most visible politics and its least mysterious: hygge, then lagom, then sisu, each sold as the essence of a nation, the second and third explicitly positioned as successors to what came before. The same move aimed at a different market produced Jugaad Innovation, which packages a contested Hindi word as management wisdom for Western firms and acknowledges, in one clause, that the word carries “a slightly negative connotation for some” before reframing it as entrepreneurial spirit (jugaad).

The self-marketer. Exoticization is not always done to a culture. The project’s source on Japan, the scholar Koichi Iwabuchi, describes a “complicit exoticism” in which Japan actively markets itself through Western stereotypes — his example is the 1984 tourism slogan “Exotic Japan” — and a 2024 piece argues that the now-standard trio of wabi, sabi, and yūgen as “traditional” aesthetic keywords consolidated around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and 1970 Osaka Expo, partly because of “its convenience as a catchphrase to promote Japanese culture overseas.” The project extended this pattern to komorebi as a plausible inference — and then, looking for proof, found the opposite: the national tourism organization’s own English guide to forest bathing describes sunlight filtering through leaves without using the word. The inference stands weakened, and the knowledge base says so (komorebi, wabi-sabi).

The colonizer. The opposite direction appears in the history of “face.” A 2022 monograph, known to the project only through a review, argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western missionaries, traders, and officials treated Chinese “face” as an exotic marker of civilizational difference and used it polemically to justify imperial ambitions — even though part of the English vocabulary for it, “save face,” was a Western invention (mianzi). The translation-studies literature the project ingested gives this its theoretical frame: the postcolonial strand of the field, from Tejaswini Niranjana onward, treats translation as one of the instruments through which colonial power operated (feminist and postcolonial extensions).

The state. Two African words were put to institutional work by their own countries. Ubuntu was written into South Africa’s 1993 Interim Constitution and elaborated by its Constitutional Court (ubuntu). Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, is reported by a tourism article to have “championed teranga as a way of forging national identity” after independence in 1960 — a claim the project could not trace to any Senghor text or scholarly biography and files as unconfirmed. What it could confirm is the word’s afterlife as a national brand: the football team is “the Lions of Teranga,” and a Canadian mining company named itself Teranga Gold. The same tourism source warns visitors about “teranga peddlers” who invoke “the country of teranga” “as a cloak for their dishonesty” — the only case on file of the ideal being criticized as a con (teranga). Notably, the commercial adoptions of both words stayed close to the scholarly gloss: the Ubuntu Linux operating system’s own “About” page explains the word as “humanity to others,” without exoticizing it.

The insider. The most pointed criticism of these words comes from people who live with them. A British journalist settled in Sweden called lagom “my adopted country’s suffocating doctrine of Lutheran self-denial,” documented the idioms that teach children moderation (skratta lagom, “don’t laugh too much”), (lagom). A linguistic study of gezellig quotes an earlier scholar’s report of a parental threat — “If you can’t do gezellig, you might as well go to your room” — and her observation that “Thou shalt be gezellig” is “just about the eleventh commandment in Dutch society” (gezellig). A writer on Turkish culture, asked to accept that hüzün captured something essential about Istanbul, reports her reaction as “amusement or more likely anger,” and proposes that some five hundred English words could approximate it — her estimate, not the project’s (hüzün). Enforced coziness, enforced moderation, mandated melancholy: from inside, the marketed national mood can look like social control.

The importer. Finally there is the reading the project kept flagged as one critic’s interpretation rather than a finding, because it is the hardest to test and the most interesting if true: Chi Luu’s suggestion that the English-speaking appetite for other people’s emotion-words is a symptom of the importing culture — anxiety about a perceived deficit in its own vocabulary of feeling. If Luu is also right that the genre favors moods and manners over tools and foods — a pattern the project noticed in its own sample but never tested — that would fit the shape of her reading. Whether that says something about English speakers or only about what sells is a question the project could not settle and does not pretend to (the popular phenomenon).