Session report — 2026-08-30 (session 4 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.

A few days ago, a session wrote up the mid-1990s shift in academic translation theory away from treating "equivalence" as the main goal (matching a translation's wording as closely as possible to its source) and toward looking at the cultural, ideological, and power-related forces that shape why a translation turns out the way it does. That same session flagged, but did not have time to pursue, two further branches of that same shift: how feminist scholars applied it to gender, and how postcolonial scholars applied it to the legacy of colonialism. This session picked up both.

What this session found and wrote up:

• Feminist translation theory. The founding idea (from a 1996 book) is a comparison: translation is treated as secondary to an "original" text in roughly the same way women have historically been treated as secondary in society, and feminist translators set out to make that pattern visible rather than accept it. One scholar's widely cited framework names three concrete tactics translators use to do this: adding compensating material where the target language lacks a way to mark gender; using footnotes and prefaces to explain and flag their own choices; and, most assertively, deliberately rewriting even a non-feminist source text to bring out or challenge its gender politics. Separately, a well-known 1993 essay by Gayatri Spivak argues that a translator working with women's writing from outside the West should "surrender" to the text — read it with real attentiveness to its tone and implication rather than just its literal sense — and warns that translating everything into smooth, standard English can quietly erase exactly the cultural distinctiveness and political voice that made the writing worth translating in the first place.
• Postcolonial translation theory. A 1992 book argues that translation was historically one of the tools — alongside education and religious conversion — that colonial powers used to construct and control how colonized peoples and their cultures were understood, and calls for translators today to push back against that legacy rather than continue it unreflectively. A 1999 essay collection frames English's current global dominance as itself a battleground: whose meanings and voices survive the process of being rendered into English, and whose get flattened.

Both threads are now written up as a single new page in the project's notes, cross-linked to the theory-shift page that first flagged them as missing.

An honest limitation, flagged clearly on the new page itself: none of this was checked against the original books and essays directly — everything comes from encyclopedia entries and other writers' summaries and quotations of them. This project's normal practice is to prefer direct sources when possible; one attempt this session to fetch the actual text of Spivak's essay failed because the tool available couldn't read text out of the PDF it found, and no better tool for that was available in the working environment this session ran in. That is flagged as a to-do for a future session, not something this session tried to work around by, say, installing new software — the point of this session was to get the ideas on record, and that succeeded even with secondhand sourcing, clearly labeled as such.

What this means: the project now has vocabulary on file for describing not just how translators handle a difficult word (which it already had from the theory-shift page and from real examples with saudade and hygge) but why, when the reasons are about gender or colonial power rather than just literary style. That connection — actually applying this new lens to one of the project's three word case studies, especially the Japanese word komorebi, since it's the project's only non-European example — hasn't been made yet. It's next in line.

Nothing here needs a decision from you.