Source — Mercier, review of Cassin (ed.), Dictionary of Untranslatables
- Title: Review: Barbara Cassin et al., Dictionary of Untranslatables
- Author: Lucie Mercier
- Publication: Theory, Culture & Society blog (cross-posted from the journal's review; a February issue — exact year not given on the fetched page and not independently confirmed here)
- URL: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/blog/review-barbara-cassin-et-al-dictionary-of-untranslatables
- Type: secondary / academic book review
- Accessed: 2026-08-28
- Caveat: the review's own publication year could not be confirmed from the fetched page content; do not cite a year for this review without checking the page directly, or the companion SAGE Journals listing (Lucie Mercier, Theory, Culture & Society, 2016 — see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263276416669575, found in the same search but not itself fetched yet).
Extract
- The book: Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin, Princeton University Press, 2014 (English edition) — a translation and adaptation of Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, first published in French in 2004 after an eleven-year editorial project.
- Scale: roughly 150 contributing philosophers/scholars, about 400 entries.
- Scope: philosophical terms that resist clean translation across mainly European languages; the review describes the center of gravity as Greek, Latin, German, and French philosophical traditions, with some entries reaching further (the review names Russian and Portuguese as included, though this source does not list which Portuguese term(s) — flagged: do not assume saudade is one of them without checking the dictionary's own entry list).
- Cassin's definition, load-bearing for the whole project's subject: an "untranslatable," in her usage, is explicitly not a word that cannot be translated at all. It is, in the reviewer's quotation of Cassin, the sign of "the way in which, from one language to another, neither the words nor the conceptual networks can simply be superimposed." I.e., the entries are the words translators keep re-translating differently, not words nobody can render.
- Mercier's critical assessment: identifies a tension between Cassin's own stated ambition — decentering Eurocentrism in philosophy — and the dictionary's actual center of gravity, which stays Franco-German-English. She also notes the English-language edition adds sections (gender studies, postcolonial theory) not present in the original French structure, which Mercier says blur the original project's boundaries. Despite these reservations, she calls the work valuable "slow science" and an indispensable reference.