Session report — 2026-08-30 (session 2 today)

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — from popular claims about words like hygge and saudade having no real English equivalent, to the academic tradition that has argued about what "untranslatable" even means, to how professional translators actually handle these words in print. The plan is to eventually use that base to test individual untranslatability claims against the evidence.

This session added a third word to the two already on file (saudade, Portuguese; hygge, Danish): komorebi (木漏れ日), a Japanese word for sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees — the project's first case from outside Europe, something the project's own plan had been putting off for a while.

What it found: the word breaks down cleanly into three ordinary Japanese word-parts meaning "tree," "leaking through," and "sun" — no mysterious or disputed history, unlike some of the other celebrated words. Three separate, independently checked Japanese dictionaries all treat it as a completely unremarkable everyday word — nothing marks it as special, rare, or poetic within Japanese itself. That's a useful, concrete contrast with how English-language blog posts about "beautiful untranslatable words" describe it: as something exceptional and almost magical, without citing any dictionary or evidence for that framing. Another finding: unlike hygge, which has actually been added to English dictionaries (Merriam-Webster since 1960, the Oxford English Dictionary since 2017), komorebi has not — this project checked directly and found no English dictionary entry for it at all.

What it could not find, despite trying: an actual example of a professional translator handling this word in a real published translation of Japanese literature — the kind of evidence already on file for saudade and hygge. Plenty of English-language commentary about the word turned up, but no case of a translator's actual choice in a real text. That's being recorded honestly as an open gap for a future session to fill, not glossed over or quietly dropped, with a concrete suggestion for how to search better next time (start from a known Japanese book, not from generic search terms).

This is exactly the kind of finding the project is designed to produce: some claims about these words hold up under scrutiny so far (no dictionary evidence undermines the plain meaning), while others — the "untranslatable" framing itself — start to look like unexamined marketing rhetoric once you actually check.

Next session's most promising lead is chasing down that missing translation example for komorebi. Nothing here needs a decision from you.