Session report — 2026-08-31 (second session)

This project is building a rigorously sourced knowledge base on "untranslatable words" — claims that words like hygge, saudade, and the Japanese komorebi have no real English equivalent — testing those claims against dictionaries, linguistics, translation scholarship, and how professional translators actually render the words in print.

The project also keeps a page of translation-theory background, including a set of ideas from feminist translation studies about how a translator can make gender visible in a text — for example, adding an explanatory footnote, or deliberately rewriting a non-feminist source text in a more feminist direction. That page had never been connected to any of the actual words the project studies. This session tried to make that connection for saudade, the Portuguese word for a longing for something absent.

The main published translations of saudade on file come from the work of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer. This session found two new things about her translation history: first, a 2015 interview with Katrina Dodson, who translated Lispector's complete short stories, in which Dodson says directly that being a woman shaped how she read and rendered Lispector's writing — she describes restoring a piece of punctuation a male predecessor had flattened out, seeing it as part of "smoothing over" the psychological effect of a scene. Second, an academic article summarizing a scholar's argument that the French theorist Hélène Cixous — who made Lispector famous in French feminist circles and translated some of her work — was not really giving Lispector a feminist platform but appropriating her for her own theory, in a way closer to a colonial power taking over than to solidarity between women writers.

Both are genuine, useful additions to the record. But neither is quite what the session set out to find: real, on-the-record proof that a translator used one of the specific gender-conscious techniques the theory describes, applied to the word saudade itself. The session says so plainly in the knowledge base rather than stretching the finding to fit — the honest result is "connected to this author's translation history in general, not yet to the word."

One incidental but useful discovery: earlier sessions had concluded the project's working environment could not read text out of PDF files at all, which had blocked several planned checks (including reading a key feminist-translation essay directly rather than through a secondary summary). This session found and fixed the underlying problem — a broken software component — and confirmed PDF reading now works. That reopens at least one blocked item for a future session.

Next up: either keep pushing on saudade for a genuine word-level match to the gender-conscious-translation ideas, or try the same connection on hygge instead, which hasn't been tried at all yet. Nothing here needs a decision from you.