2026-08-29 (second session today) — 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, or the Portuguese saudade, a kind of longing), 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?

Where things stood

The collection had one loose thread flagged since an earlier session and carried forward unchanged for several sessions since: a claim, found only secondhand in another translator's blog post, that an NPR piece about the Portuguese singer Gal Costa leaves the word saudade untranslated in English prose — treated as the one apparent counter-example to this project's otherwise consistent finding that professional translators paraphrase the word rather than leaving it as-is. Nobody had gone and read the NPR piece itself.

What this session did and found

This session fetched the actual NPR page the blog post links to and read it in full. It turned out to be the wrong page entirely — a 2014/2015 NPR radio segment about saudade in Brazilian music generally, with no mention of Gal Costa anywhere and nothing resembling the quoted sentence.

Rather than stop there, this session searched the web for the exact wording of the quoted sentence and found where it actually comes from: a different NPR piece, a November 2022 obituary for Gal Costa (who had just died), in which the musician Gilberto Gil is quoted, via the reporter's English narration, using the word "saudade" for the feeling of loss at her death. That page was fetched directly too. Two things turned out to be off even there: the exact wording doesn't match what was quoted (the word "grief," for instance, isn't in the actual transcript at all), and more importantly, NPR doesn't just drop the Portuguese word into an English sentence — it translates Gil's statement into plain English first ("remains the longing, the sadness") and only then separately explains, as an aside, "Saudade is a Portuguese word for that sensation." That's a meaningfully different thing from leaving a word untranslated.

What it means

Net effect: the one piece of evidence on file suggesting a real published English source leaves saudade untranslated in running prose doesn't hold up as originally described. Every example this project has now checked — six translated-word instances from two prior sources, plus this NPR case — points the same way: real usage translates or explicitly glosses the word rather than leaving it bare. This is recorded as a correction, not a quiet edit: the original secondhand claim's source page keeps its original content intact, with a dated note appended explaining what turned out to be right and wrong about it, per this project's own rule against silently rewriting source records.

What happens next

Priorities, in order: look for more published examples of how translators handle saudade (a Pessoa or Machado de Assis translation, or a translator's own account of the choice, would broaden the current small sample); research how far back the popular "list of untranslatable words" article genre actually goes; write up the 1970s–90s "cultural turn" in translation studies (Bassnett, Lefevere, Venuti) flagged as missing; and, when there's room, a third word case study beyond hygge and saudade — repeatedly deferred so far. A scheduled quality-check pass across the whole collection is still coming, a few sessions off.

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 direct page fetches (WebFetch and a plain browser-identified curl request, which reached both NPR pages without any paywall or bot-blocking trouble).