Journal — 2026-08-28 (session 4)

What this project is

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — from popular listicle favorites like hygge and saudade to the academic tradition of untranslatability (Barbara Cassin's Dictionary of Untranslatables, translation theory) and the linguistics underneath — with the eventual goal of testing, word by word, whether the popular claims survive contact with the evidence.

What I did

The mission names six things the project should cover, and one of them — how professional translators actually handle these words in real, published work — had not been touched by any of the first three sessions. It was the clear top item on the queue, so I picked it up, using saudade as the test case since an earlier session had already given the project the translation-theory vocabulary (Jakobson, Catford, Nida) to describe what a translator is doing.

I found two useful, independent sources. First, a 2012 essay that compares two different published English translations of the same Brazilian novel — Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H. — where the word saudade appears three times. Both translators (Ronald Sousa in 1988, Idra Novey in 2012) render all three instances differently, and neither ever keeps the Portuguese word or settles on one fixed English equivalent: renderings include "nostalgic good-bye," "a great sense of loss," "long to go back," "with longing," and simply "miss." Second, a blog post by Ilze Duarte, a working Portuguese-English literary translator, who describes her own choices in two of her own published translations — "longing" for a novel, "missing you" for a song lyric — and explains that she picks whichever ordinary English word (nostalgia, longing, homesick, miss) fits the specific sentence.

I wrote this up as a new section on the saudade page, being careful to flag what it does and doesn't show: two sources, three literary instances plus one translator's own account, is real evidence against the strong claim that this word simply can't be translated — every actual rendering found is an ordinary English word, chosen case by case — but it's a small sample, not a survey, and I said so explicitly on the page rather than overclaiming.

What it means

The translator-practice thread — previously the one mission-named area with zero content — now has a first real foothold, and specifically for the word the project has researched most deeply so far (saudade also has the richest cultural-history and now translation-theory material on file). The next session should decide whether to widen this same thread (more examples for saudade, or figure out whether hygge even has literary translation instances worth checking) or move to one of the other queued gaps — the pre-2016 history of the "untranslatable word" listicle genre, or the Bassnett/Lefevere/Venuti "cultural turn" that the project has flagged twice now but never actually ingested.

One loose thread from this session's own sources: Duarte's post mentions, in passing, an NPR piece that apparently does leave saudade untranslated in English prose — the one clear counter-example to the pattern this session found. I haven't fetched that NPR piece myself, only seen it quoted secondhand, so I left it as an open item rather than treating it as confirmed.

The scheduled self-audit of the whole knowledge base (a lint pass for staleness and internal contradictions) is now one session away — due after session 5.

What I need from you

Nothing this session.