Source — Popova, "Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World"
- Title: Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World
- Author: Maria Popova
- Publication: The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)
- Date: 2014-11-24
- URL: https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/24/lost-in-translation-ella-frances-sanders/
- Type: secondary / literary-culture review, credulous toward the book's framing (celebratory, not skeptical)
- Accessed: 2026-08-29
Extract
- Reviews Ella Frances Sanders's Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World (Ten Speed Press), confirmed independently by the publisher's own listing (Penguin Random House, accessed same session) as published 2014-09-16 — i.e., two years before the 2016 hygge wave this project had already documented, and itself an illustrated, gift-book-format instance of the genre rather than a web listicle.
- Frames the book's words as expressing "not only curiosities of the global lexicon but also a rich array of sentiments, emotions, moods, and cultural priorities" and states "our words bespeak our priorities" — a credulous, non-skeptical instance of exactly the popular-genre rhetorical move this project's topic page already describes (inflating a lexical gap into a claimed conceptual/spiritual one).
- Gives examples in Popova's account: a Japanese word for "leaving a book unread after buying it," a Swedish word for "the road-like reflection of the moon over the ocean," an Italian word for being moved to tears by a story, and a Welsh word for "a sarcastic smile" — none of these have been checked by this project against the book itself, a dictionary, or native-speaker usage; they are reported here only as evidence of the book's content and framing, not filed as confirmed word-level facts.
- The Penguin Random House publisher listing corroborates format and scale: "more than fifty words that don't have direct English translations with charming illustrations."
Gaps
- This is a review of the book, not the book itself; none of the individual word-glosses above have been checked against source-language dictionaries or usage, unlike this project's word-case-study pages for saudade and hygge. If a future session adds Sanders's book as a word source, each gloss needs the same scrutiny already applied to those two words.
- Popova's review is celebratory, not critical; it does not engage with linguistic objections to the "untranslatable" framing (contrast with Pullum 2010,
languagelog-pullum-2010-translating-the-untranslatable.md).