Source — Rachel M. Willson-Broyles, "Cultural Untranslatability in Swedish-English Literary Translation in the Age of the Internet" (PhD dissertation, UW–Madison, 2013)

• Title: Cultural Untranslatability in Swedish-English Literary Translation in the Age of the Internet
• Author: Rachel M. Willson-Broyles
• Publication: PhD dissertation, Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison; hosted openly on the university's own digital-collections asset server
• URL: https://asset.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/LTYV7CSJY7XSA8L/R/file-f6d8a.pdf
• Date: 2013 (final oral examination 28 May 2013)
• Accessed: 2026-09-02
• Type: primary/secondary hybrid — an academic dissertation (secondary scholarship on translation) whose empirical core is the author's own direct comparison of published translations, and which includes her own first-hand translator's account for one of the four novels she analyzes (she translated it herself). Neutral-to-analytical stance; not a popularization source.
• Access method note: downloaded directly (curl) as a PDF and extracted with pdftotext -layout (plain pdfminer.six extraction badly scrambled the appendix's multi-column table; -layout mode preserved row alignment — noted here as a technique for any future session extracting tabular data from a PDF). This is an openly-hosted university dissertation, not an unauthorized scan of an in-print copyrighted book — does not fall under this project's copyrighted-scan fence.

Extract

Framing (relevant to this project's own linguistics apparatus): the dissertation independently invokes Jakobson's syr/"cottage cheese" example (already on this project's translation-theory page) to frame its own research question — whether internet access has changed translators' willingness to leave a source-culture item untranslated rather than substituting an "adequate interpretation." It explicitly names lagom, alongside fika and jantelagen, as one of the "social concepts and customs considered central or unique to Swedish culture" that its case-study method targets.

Method: close comparison of four Swedish novels translated into English, paired into a "before the Web" and "after the Web" set (the author's cutoff for "the Web" is 1994) within two genres:

• Coming-of-age: P.C. Jersild, Barnens ö (1976) → Children's Island, tr. Joan Tate (1986) [before] vs. Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Montecore — En unik tiger (2006) → Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger, tr. Rachel Willson-Broyles herself (2011) [after].
• Crime: Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, Det slutna rummet (1972) → The Locked Room, tr. Paul Britten Austin (1973) [before] vs. Stieg Larsson, Luftslottet som sprängdes (2007, third Millennium-trilogy novel) → tr. Reg Keeland [after].

Every culture-specific item across all four novels is coded in a data table (Appendix A) by strategy: non-translation (the source word is kept as-is in the English text), substitution (an ordinary target-language word or near-equivalent is used instead), omission (the item is dropped from the translation entirely), contextualizing (the surrounding sentence is reworked so the concept is conveyed without a direct word-for-word stand-in), and a few rarer categories (literal/linguistic translation, transformation).

The full lagom dataset — this project's first genuinely multi-translator, multi-instance translator-practice data point for any word on file, extracted directly from Appendix A (source-text page → English-text page → translator's rendering → the dissertation's own strategy label):

The word does not appear at all in the fourth novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes (tr. Reg Keeland) — a genuine absence in that text, not a translation choice.

Pattern: across three translators and eleven instances (counting the omitted phrase), lagom is rendered with an ordinary English word or phrase in nine cases and dropped outright in one; it is kept as the untranslated loanword "lagom" in only two instances, both on the same page of the one "after the Web" novel, translated by the dissertation's own author. Every "before the Web" instance (Tate 1986, Britten Austin 1973 — four instances total) is either paraphrased in plain English or omitted; none of them keeps the Swedish word. This is directly relevant to, but does not straightforwardly confirm, the dissertation's own "post-internet translators translate differently" thesis: even the one translator most disposed by her own research question to consider non-translation used it for only 2 of her own 7 instances, paraphrasing the other 5 exactly as the pre-internet translators did.

Gaps

• The dissertation's main prose chapters discuss lagom only in the introductory list of target concepts (quoted above); there is no dedicated close-reading paragraph analyzing the lagom instances specifically the way there is, e.g., for filmjölk — the data above is drawn from the raw Appendix A table, not from connected prose discussion, and this project has supplied its own synthesis of the pattern rather than quoting the author's.
• The strategy labels ("substitution," "contextualizing," etc.) are the dissertation's own technical taxonomy, defined in chapter four (not fully reproduced here); "substitution" in this table covers what looks, from the renderings themselves, like ordinary same-register English paraphrase rather than the more specific near-synonym sense the dissertation's own worked example (filmjölk → "kefir"/"yogurt") suggests — flagged as a possible looseness in the coding scheme, not resolved here.
• Only one Willson-Broyles translation is analyzed; whether she or other post-2011 Swedish-English translators treat lagom the same way in other books is unchecked.

Used in

• Lagom