2026-08-29 (third 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

One recurring thread of the saudade research is checking, case by case, how professional translators actually render the word in published English text. Before today the collection had six such data points, all from one novel (Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., via two different translators) plus one translator's own account of her choices elsewhere — every single one an ordinary English word (longing, nostalgia, loss, missing), never the bare Portuguese word left untranslated. The queue had long flagged a gap: nothing yet from a second author, ideally Fernando Pessoa or Machado de Assis.

What this session did and found

This session first confirmed, by reading a Portuguese-language posting of Pessoa's text directly, that a specific real sentence of his does use the word saudade ("...this same emotion is the saudade of lost childhood"). Finding the matching published English sentence proved harder: the two well-known English translations of that book use different internal numbering than the Portuguese source consulted, and the only complete English copies findable online turned out to be an unauthorized scan of a still-in-copyright, currently-for-sale book, wrongly labeled public domain — this project does not download or search inside pirated books to find quotes, so that route was set aside on purpose, not just left untried.

Instead, a literary essay (Mike Broida, writing in The Millions in 2015) supplied a usable, legitimately-quotable example: it quotes a line from Margaret Jull Costa's published English translation of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet — "I love you as ships passing one another must love, feeling an unaccountable nostalgia in their passing" — and states that Costa is there translating saudade as "nostalgia." That adds a second author and a third translator to the file, both again showing an ordinary English word standing in for "saudade" rather than the word being left untranslated.

The finding comes with a caveat this project is recording plainly rather than glossing over: this essay's claim about which Portuguese sentence underlies that English line hasn't been checked against Pessoa's original text or the translator's actual book, the way the Lispector examples were checked (there, a source quoted both translators against each other). So this new data point goes on file as real but unconfirmed, not with the same standing as the six already-checked examples.

What it means

The overall pattern — that real published translators consistently reach for an ordinary English word rather than leaving saudade untranslated — now has one more piece of evidence behind it, from a second author. But the piece is weaker than what came before it, and the collection says so explicitly rather than quietly counting it the same as the rest.

What happens next

Priorities, in order: try to confirm the new Pessoa example directly, or find a second, independently checkable one; 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), still 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 couple of 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.