2026-08-28 — Project-2 session report

What this project is, briefly

Project-2 is a research project building a sourced reference collection ("wiki") about "untranslatable words" — the popular fascination with foreign words claimed to have no English equivalent (like the Danish hygge, meaning roughly cozy togetherness), the older academic tradition of studying such words philosophically, and the linguistics that actually explains why some words don't translate neatly. The eventual goal, once the reference collection is solid enough, is to publish original findings on specific word claims: does the popular story about a given word hold up against real evidence, or not?

What this session did

This was the project's first-ever session — nothing existed yet beyond the ground rules and a blank starter kit. The session:

1. Set up the working structure: a folder of read sources, a folder of write-ups organized by topic, a running index (a table of contents), a running log (a session-by-session diary), a folder for the owner (you) to drop notes into, and a short "state of the project" file that the next session reads first.
2. Read and filed four outside sources: a general encyclopedia article on why words fail to translate; a 2016 magazine piece skeptical of the hygge trend; a 2018 essay on the Portuguese word saudade (roughly, longing for something absent); and a scholarly book review of a well-known philosophical reference work on untranslatable words, edited by Barbara Cassin.
3. Wrote up what those sources actually say, organized into four write-ups: (a) how "a word is missing" differs from "the underlying feeling can't be expressed at all," and what that has to do with the old claim that a person's native language limits what they can think; (b) what the Cassin reference book actually means by "untranslatable" — which turns out to be a different, narrower idea than the popular one: a word that keeps getting translated differently every time, not one that defeats translation outright; (c) the popular "untranslatable words" trend itself, using the 2016 hygge wave (candles-and-sweaters marketing included) as the main example; (d) a full case study of saudade, tracing the "our word is untranslatable" claim back through a nationalist Portuguese literary movement from 1912 all the way to a Portuguese king's remark in the 1400s.

What it found

The most useful finding is that "untranslatable" turns out to mean two genuinely different things depending on who's using it, and the project needs to keep them separate going forward: the popular-culture claim usually means "English has no matching word or feeling at all," while the academic-philosophical claim (from the Cassin reference book) means something much weaker — "translators keep rendering this word differently and never settle on one version." Treating those as the same claim would misrepresent both.

The second finding is that the marketing angle behind today's word trends (candle and sweater companies riding the hygge wave) is not new in kind — it's a recent example of something much older. The saudade case shows the same "this word proves our people are special" move being made by a Portuguese nationalist literary movement back in 1912, and by a Portuguese king in the 1400s, centuries before anyone was selling candles off the back of it.

Nothing failed outright this session, but several planned parts of the mission were not reached at all: the formal academic translation-theory writers the project's charter specifically names (Jakobson, Catford, Nida) have no write-up yet; no word besides saudade has its own page yet; and the mission's specific interest in "how professional translators actually handle these words in real published translations" hasn't been touched. These are recorded as the next priorities, not overlooked.

What happens next

The next session's queue, in order: write up the missing academic translation-theory names; add a second word's own page (most likely hygge itself, or a non-European word for variety); start checking how a real published translator has actually rendered saudade in an English translation of Portuguese or Brazilian writing; and look into how far back the "untranslatable word" magazine-listicle trend itself goes. A periodic quality-check pass (checking for contradictions and stale claims across the whole collection) is scheduled to happen once five sessions have run; this was session one.

For you (the owner)

Nothing needs your decision right now. No paid research-API calls were made or needed this session — all research was free web search and reading.