Source — Penguin Random House, official book description for "Lost in Translation" (Ella Frances Sanders)

• Title: Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World (book description page)
• Author: unattributed — publisher-supplied jacket/marketing copy
• Publication: PenguinRandomHouse.com (the book's US publisher, Ten Speed Press, is a Penguin Random House imprint)
• Date: page undated; the book itself is 2014-09-16 (per themarginalian-popova-2014-lost-in-translation.md)
• URL: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239619/lost-in-translation-by-ella-frances-sanders/
• Type: tertiary / publisher marketing copy — not the book's own text, and credulous by nature (sales copy)
• Accessed: 2026-08-31

Extract

• Fetched directly via curl (not WebFetch's synthesized summary — see Gaps below on why this mattered) and the raw HTML's aboutTheBook field read directly. Exact quote: "Did you know that the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees? Or that there's a Finnish word for the distance a reindeer can travel before needing to rest? Lost in Translation brings to life more than fifty words that don't have direct English translations with charming illustrations of their tender, poignant, and humorous definitions."
• The identical sentence ("the Japanese language has a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees") also appears, via WebFetch, on the Barnes & Noble product page (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lost-in-translation-ella-frances-sanders/1117794997) and is paraphrased on the book's Internet Archive listing (https://archive.org/details/lostintranslatio0000sand, "the Japanese have a word to express the way sunlight filters through the leaves of trees") — evidently the same publisher-supplied copy syndicated across retail/library-listing sites, not three independent confirmations.
• This sentence describes, but does not name, a word. "Komorebi" does not appear by name on any of these three pages. The description matches komorebi's dictionary-sourced popular gloss exactly (see wiki/words/komorebi.md Dictionary treatment: デジタル大辞泉's "樹木の枝葉の間からさし込む日光," "sunlight shining through the spaces between tree branches and leaves") and this project has found no other well-known Japanese "untranslatable word" with this specific meaning — but the identity of the actual headword used inside the book remains unconfirmed by direct textual reading.

Gaps

• Does not itself confirm the word is spelled/romanized "komorebi" in the book — only that an entry with this exact meaning exists.
• This session also tried to check the book's own text directly via Google Books' SearchWithinVolume JSON endpoint (https://books.google.com/books?id=<volume-id>&q=<term>&jscmd=SearchWithinVolume, tried against Google Books volume IDs 9p-dBAAAQBAJ and 6QdxAwAAQBAJ) — a genuinely new method, not previously tried by this project. Result: {"number_of_results":0,...} for "komorebi" — but also 0 results for "hiraeth" and "tsundoku", words already confirmed present in the book by independent reviews (see themarginalian-popova-2014-lost-in-translation.md for tsundoku; multiple reviews for hiraeth). Since the tool returns 0 for known-present words, it is not indexing this book's text at all (consistent with the archive.org copy's search-inside being disabled, already on record) — its 0-result answer for "komorebi" is not evidence of absence and should not be cited as such.
• A Goodreads user review (username "karen", dated 2018-12-28, URL https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1688900037) was found via WebSearch/WebFetch's synthesized summary to quote "KOMOREBI (Japanese): The sunlight that filters through the leaves of the trees" as one of the reviewer's favorite entries from the book — but the review page itself is sign-in-gated (confirmed this session: both WebFetch and a direct curl with a browser User-Agent return only Goodreads' "Sign in" page, no review content), so this project could not read the review directly and, per standing practice, does not file a claim it could not verify by direct reading. Not filed as evidence; recorded here only so a future session with a different access method does not need to re-discover this lead. If confirmed by direct reading, it would settle the question.

Used in

• Komorebi — the popularization-genealogy gap (Sanders 2014 inclusion).