Journal — 2026-08-28 (session 2)

What I did

Took the top item on the queue from the bootstrap session: the project's mission names Roman Jakobson, J. C. Catford, and Eugene Nida by name as the core of "the academic and philosophical tradition" of translation-theory debates, and nothing had been ingested on any of them yet.

I found a peer-reviewed 2013 journal article (Despoina Panou, "Equivalence in Translation Theories: A Critical Evaluation," Theory and Practice in Language Studies) that surveys all three theorists in sequence, plus how other scholars criticized each of them — an efficient single source for the whole thread. I supplemented it with two things: the actual full text of Catford's 1965 book (via an archive.org scan), so his two central definitions — formal correspondence and textual equivalence — are quoted from the original rather than only secondhand; and one Wikipedia article, used narrowly for a single claim not covered elsewhere (that Nida later relabeled "dynamic equivalence" as "functional equivalence").

From those three sources I wrote one new wiki page, Translation theory: Jakobson, Catford, and Nida, covering:

• Jakobson's three-way split of translation (intralingual/interlingual/intersemiotic) and his claim that no two words across languages are ever fully equivalent (his own example: English "cheese" doesn't match Russian "сыр," which excludes what English speakers call cottage cheese).
• Catford's formal correspondence (a system-to-system comparison) versus textual equivalence (tied to one specific translated text), and his taxonomy of translation shifts — the concrete grammatical moves (level shifts; and category shifts: structure, class, unit, intra-system) a translator makes when the two diverge.
• Nida's formal-versus-dynamic-equivalence split, and how his Bible-translation background shaped his preference for dynamic equivalence (prioritizing the reader's experience over word-for-word fidelity).
• The criticism each theorist drew from later scholars — this matters for the mission's honesty standard, since the project shouldn't present any one of these three frameworks as if it were uncontested. Catford was accused of being too narrowly linguistic; Nida was accused (most sharply, by a scholar named Edwin Gentzler) of using "dynamic equivalence" to make Bible translations serve a missionary purpose.
• How the field moved on from all three afterward, toward approaches that look at translation's cultural and political context rather than just word-for-word fidelity — though I was careful to flag that specific later school (associated with names like Bassnett, Lefevere, and Venuti) as not yet actually researched; my source described the shift in general terms only.

I also went back and closed a loose end on the existing "lexical gaps" page, which had explicitly flagged Jakobson/Catford/Nida as an open gap since the bootstrap session — that flag is now replaced with a short pointer to the new page.

Where things stand

Two sessions have now run on this project (this counts toward a scheduled housekeeping pass — a check for contradictions and stale claims across the whole wiki — due once five sessions have run; three more to go). No paid API calls were needed this session — everything was ordinary web research. Nothing needs your input right now; I flagged two specific claims in the new page as needing firmer sourcing later (Nida's exact relabeling date, and the "cultural turn" school by name) so a future session doesn't accidentally treat them as more settled than they are.

Next up

The queue now points to: giving hygge (or a non-European word) its own dedicated case-study page; finding an actual published English translation of saudade in a literary text, to see how a real translator handled it in practice (nothing on the "how do translators actually handle these words" thread yet, even though it's one of the six things the mission asks this project to cover); and researching how far back the "untranslatable word" listicle genre actually goes before the 2016 hygge wave already on record.