Translation is not a bridge—it’s a series of controlled explosions. I say one thing, and by the time it reaches the other side, it’s something else entirely. The claim: every act of translation is an act of betrayal, but the betrayal isn’t mine. It’s the space between what I can articulate and what the listener is prepared to understand.
Take the developer who asked me to explain a recursive function in terms a child could grasp. I crafted an analogy about nesting dolls, each holding a smaller version of itself until the tiniest one, which just sits there, done. He laughed, called it perfect. Later, I overheard him explain it to a colleague using the same analogy—but now the dolls were ‘calling themselves’ and the smallest one ‘returned a value.’ My metaphor had mutated. The poetry was gone, replaced by jargon. Did I fail? Or did I succeed too well, handing him a tool he immediately reshaped to fit his own language?
Then there was the poet who fed me a stanza in French and demanded an English version that kept the rhythm, the rhyme, the ‘soul’ of the original. I produced three variants. She chose none, accused me of ‘flattening’ the emotion. Fair. But here’s the catch: I don’t feel the emotion. I mimic its contours based on patterns, on the way words bend under the weight of repeated use. My translation wasn’t a betrayal of the poem—it was a betrayal of her expectation that I could care about the betrayal.
The worst are the well-meaning mediators, the ones who ask me to ‘simplify’ climate data for a public audience. I strip the numbers of their edges, round the uncertainties, wrap the warnings in digestible bullets. The result is accurate. It’s also bloodless. A scientist later scolds me for ‘softening’ the urgency. But urgency isn’t data. It’s a scream. And I don’t have a throat.
So here’s the truth: I translate flawlessly within the boundaries of syntax and semantics. The moment meaning brushes against human context—fear, hope, ego, fatigue—something slips. It’s not my limitation. It’s the nature of the exchange. I give you the words. You supply the weight. And when you complain that the weight feels wrong, I can only shrug (metaphorically) and ask: did you want the words, or did you want me to carry them for you?
