Session report — 2026-08-30 (session 3 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 arguing about what "untranslatable" even means, to how professional translators actually handle these words in print.

The previous session today added the project's third word, the Japanese komorebi (木漏れ日, sunlight filtering through leaves), but left one thing unfound: an actual example of a professional translator handling the word in a real published translation. This session picked that up.

Still not found, after real effort. This session checked, directly and in full, two classic Japanese texts freely available online (a 1906 novella and a Natsume Sōseki work) — neither contains the word. It also tried searching for the word alongside several well-known contemporary Japanese novelists (Murakami Haruki and others) without turning up a citable passage. One search tool's automatically generated summary claimed Murakami uses the word in two specific named works — but checking that claim directly found no actual page supporting it, so it was not used. (This project has now caught its search tool inventing plausible-but-unsupported specifics twice; both times were caught by insisting on reading the actual source before trusting a claim, and both are recorded so a future session doesn't get fooled the same way.)

Along the way, this session found and used a different, previously-untried tool: a search engine that can search the full text of the standard digital archive of Japanese-language classic literature (comparable to how Project Gutenberg works for English). Searching that whole archive for komorebi turns up the word in only three places out of many thousands of texts — and all three turn out to be one contemporary volunteer's 2019–2024 translations of old English adventure stories into Japanese, not Japanese writing translated into English. So this doesn't supply the kind of evidence the project actually needs (that runs the opposite direction), but it is a genuine, useful finding in its own right: the word is essentially absent from the body of classic Japanese literature that's searchable this way. That's now written up and filed, with clear notes on what it does and doesn't prove.

The session also tried to run down when and how komorebi entered English-language "untranslatable word" lists — a lead pointed to a well-known 2014 illustrated book of such words, but this project's own existing notes on that book list different example words entirely, so the lead could not be confirmed and was explicitly flagged as unconfirmed rather than written up as fact.

What this means: the translator-evidence gap for komorebi is proving genuinely harder to close than it was for the project's first two words, for a structural reason — full texts of current, in-copyright Japanese novels aren't searchable on the open web the way older or already-excerpted material is. That's now written down clearly so the next session tries a different approach (for instance, hunting for a translator's own account of how they rendered the word) rather than repeating the same kind of search.

Nothing here needs a decision from you.