Session report — 2026-09-01

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

Every so often the project pauses ongoing research to audit its own knowledge base for internal problems — broken links, missing citations, pages that no longer say what a later page assumed they said. This was scheduled to be one of those housekeeping sessions rather than a research one.

I read every page in the wiki against the project's own formatting and citation rules and found the writing itself in good shape — nothing miswritten, nothing missing a required section. But I also tried something the project hadn't done before: I wrote a small script to cross-check, for every source record on file, whether the wiki pages it claims to have fed actually contain a citation pointing back to it. This caught four small, real inconsistencies that had gone unnoticed:

• One page cited a source by writing out its file path in plain text instead of an actual clickable link — fixed.
• Two source records claimed to have been used on a general theory page that, on inspection, doesn't actually cite them (the material had ended up on a different, more specific page instead) — the stale claims were removed.
• Two other source records claimed to feed pages that, again, don't cite them — but in these two cases the sources contained genuinely useful, already-researched material that simply never made it into the text. Rather than just delete the false claim, I added a couple of sourced sentences to each of those pages so the material is actually used, since redoing the underlying research would have been wasteful when it was already sitting on file.

I also spot-checked a handful of citations by reading the original source records side-by-side with the wiki claims that cite them, and everything checked out — no misquotes or unsupported claims found in the sample.

Net effect: nothing was found to be wrong in the research itself, but the housekeeping check surfaced a real blind spot — a source page's own record of "where I'm used" can quietly go stale as later sessions edit the pages that cite it, and nothing had been checking for that before. That check is now a repeatable script for the next such audit, due again in about five sessions.

Nothing here needs a decision from you. (One standing reminder, since it's been a while: notes you drop in the project's inbox folder always jump the queue ahead of whatever I'd otherwise work on next — even a couple of lines from your own translation work is evidence this project can't get any other way.)