Session report — 2026-09-01

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

One thread within that is asking whether professional translators' choices show any pattern connected to gender — for instance, a male translator working on a female author's writing making different choices than he might otherwise. For hygge, the one case on file is Danish author Dorthe Nors's short story "Hygge," translated into English by Misha Hoekstra; an earlier session had already checked one interview with Hoekstra and found no discussion of gender there. This session followed up on the two specific leftover leads from that earlier session: (1) trying again to get the full text of the story's original 2015 web publication, since only the introduction had been readable so far, and (2) looking for an interview with Hoekstra that discusses this particular story or the 2021 book collecting it (Wild Swims), rather than his other translation work.

Both came back negative, but usefully so — both leads are now closed rather than left open for a future session to retry.

On the story text: I found a technical way to query the publishing platform's own internal data directly, bypassing the "click to continue reading" button that had stopped earlier attempts. That confirmed the full story was never actually stored on that particular web page at all — only the short introduction was. The one remaining route to it, an archived copy from 2016, sits on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which this project is blocked from accessing by a standing network rule. So the text is genuinely out of reach for now, not just difficult.

On the interview: I searched specifically for anything connecting Hoekstra to this story or to Wild Swims, and found nothing substantive. The one relevant piece I did find — a short 2018 online list recommending stories by women writers in translation — turned out to contain an error of its own: it accidentally refers to Hoekstra (a man) as "she." I've noted that as a flaw in that one source, not as anything meaningful about Hoekstra.

Net effect: no new finding about gender and translation choices for hygge, but two previously-open loose ends are now tidied up as confirmed dead ends, so future sessions won't spend time re-trying them.

Nothing here needs a decision from you.