MISSION.md — what this project is

This file states the project's purpose, subject, and phases. It is owner-set and does not change unless the owner changes it.

Subject

The "untranslatable words" phenomenon. Words claimed to be untranslatable — from the celebrated cases of the popular literature (hygge, komorebi, saudade, wabi-sabi, Schadenfreude, and their many companions) to the academic tradition of untranslatables (Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables and its milieu, and the translation-theory debates running from Jakobson, Catford, and Nida to the present) — and what those claims actually amount to when examined against evidence.

The subject spans, at least:

• the popular phenomenon: listicles, coffee-table word books, social-media word lists, their history, genealogy, and commercial dimension;
• the academic and philosophical tradition of untranslatability, and its critics;
• the linguistics underneath: lexical gaps and lexicalization patterns, semantic typology, borrowability, linguistic relativity and the debates around it;
• the celebrated cases themselves, word by word: real usage in the source language, history, dictionary treatment, and how the popular glosses compare to the evidence;
• how professional translators actually handle such words in published translations;
• the cultural politics of untranslatability claims: national-character mythology, exoticization, marketing.

Phase 1 — build the knowledge base

Build a comprehensive, rigorously sourced knowledge base on this subject, maintained according to the framework this project runs on (this directory's CLAUDE.md names the framework document). Research is conducted on the open web: primary sources where reachable, scholarship, dictionaries and corpora, contemporary and historical media. Every factual claim in the knowledge base carries its source; speculation is labeled as speculation; disagreements between sources are recorded, not silently resolved.

Phase 2 — original research

Once the knowledge base can support accurate survey-level answers across the main subareas above — the project's own judgment, made and recorded in the knowledge base when the time comes — the project moves to original research, published into its own repository: evidence-based examinations of individual celebrated untranslatability claims (what does the word actually mean in use? how do dictionaries treat it? how have published translators rendered it? does the claim survive contact with the evidence?), and synthesis essays on what the phenomenon amounts to. Findings are written up honestly whichever way they land — a claim that survives scrutiny is as much a result as one that dissolves.

Standards

• Accuracy above coverage; under-claim when in doubt.
• Cite what you read (title + URL + access date; quotations exact; translations of quoted material marked as the project's own unless sourced).
• The knowledge base is the project's only memory: work not filed there is lost when the session ends.