Translating "saudade"
The word "saudade" is often included in lists of untranslatable words. And yet, this beautiful Portuguese word can certainly be translated.
To understand why it is a mistake to say that "saudade" has no translation, we must remember that translators do not work with isolated words: they translate sentences, paragraphs, texts...
The word "saudade" will be translated in different ways depending on the sentence. You may even need to write several words to translate what, in Portuguese, is said using only "saudade".
That is precisely the job of translators, who are more creative than people usually believe — and very much used to dealing with problems, even if the problem is a word that everyone says has no translation.
I’m sure no book translated from Portuguese has ever had a blank space marked "this word is impossible to translate".
Someone might counter, "Ah, but there is no single translation of ‘saudade’, at least in English." True, there isn't, but that happens with many words, from the most banal to the most complex. The Portuguese word "café" doesn't have a single English translation either.
"Café" can be either "coffee" (the product) or "café" (the place) or "coffeeshop" (another, less French way of referring to coffee as a place). The same is true for many other words — and this is the case with "saudade", which can be translated in many ways in English.
There are also many English words that are translated by different words in Portuguese, depending on the sentence.
Just think of the verb "to get", for example, which has many different translations, from "arranjar" ("obtain") to "compreender" ("understand"), or the word "key", which can be "tecla" (as a part of a keyboard) or "chave" (which opens doors).
Even if we insist in finding a single translation for the isolated word "saudade", why limit ourselves to English? If you say that "saudade" has no translation, does that mean you know all the more than 7000 languages in the world?
Take the Romanian word “dor”. When we ask a Romanian what this word means, the description comes close to Portuguese descriptions of "saudade", as in this article.
We also have "hiraeth", in Welsh; "enyorança", in Catalan — and many other words throughout the world — they are all words that the speakers define in a very similar way to Portuguese “saudade”. There is also "saudade" in Galician...
In English, the word "longing" helps a lot to translate “saudade” — although, in everyday life, the verb "to miss" is a common solution (among others).
If someone is using the word in a more specific way, a translator may describe the word a bit more fully, as in “that somewhat pleasurable feeling of remembering someone we love” (my personal description of “saudade” in its oh-so-Portuguese manifestation).
Even in Portuguese, most uses of the word are of the basic, I-miss-you kind. I would say this is what happens with most, if not all, supposedly untranslatable words: in everyday sentences, they have straightforward translations.
Someone might now say, "Ah, but those translations, whatever they are, are never quite the same thing as the original word." Well, translation is never the same thing! This applies not only to "saudade", but to almost every word and any text.
Let's go back to coffee. If I say "café", in Portuguese, I immediately remember the small cup of very strong espresso we usually drink in Portugal...
But the same word translated into Spanish or English will awaken other images in the speakers' minds. A Briton will think primarily of a fairly large cup... A Spaniard might think first of "café con leche", not an espresso. Does this mean that "coffee" is untranslatable?
Even within each language, each word will have a very different flavour for each speaker. If I say "praia" (beach), I remember going to school everyday as a child (my hometown Peniche is surrounded by beaches). To my wife, born further inland, "praia" (the very same word in Portuguese) is linked to her childhood holidays, not her childhood everyday routine.
Words are translatable between languages — but are sometimes untranslatable between people.
The text above started as a chapter in a Portuguese book I wrote a few years ago, was transformed into a Twitter thread in English and ended up here… If you also love books and languages, don’t forget to subscribe this newsletter — and, if I may suggest, send it forward to other people. Thanks!