My work lives in more than twelve languages, which means somewhere out there are people who rebuilt my sentences — my jokes, my plot twists, the rhythm I fussed over at 2am — inside a language I can’t read. When one of those books lands, readers cry at the same chapter. Do you understand what a magic trick that is? The joke survived. The dread survived. Someone carried them across a border in their bare hands.
And then that same someone introduces themselves at a party as “just the translator.”
No. We’re done with that sentence. “Just” is doing crimes in it.
What translation actually requires
Every page, you make the exact decisions a writer makes, plus a stack of constraints the original author never faced:
- Voice, rebuilt from studs. The author’s sarcasm doesn’t come with the vocabulary. You re-engineer it from tone, timing, and nerve.
- Jokes, transplanted alive. Puns die at the border unless you invent a new one with the same job. That’s comedy writing, full stop.
- Rhythm, recomposed. A punchy four-word sentence might need seven words in your language. You decide what the punch weighs now.
- A thousand tiny betrayals, chosen well. Every sentence forces a pick: fidelity to meaning, music, or feeling. Pick wrong and the book goes flat. You almost never pick wrong. Nobody notices. That’s the job — being invisible at a professional level.
The “just” tax
| What you call it | What it would be called with a byline |
|---|---|
| “I just translated the poems.” | Wrote sixty poems that keep another poet’s soul and scan in a second language. |
| “I just localized the dialogue.” | Rewrote every line of a cast until they sounded human somewhere new. |
| “I just cleaned up the idioms.” | Invented equivalent metaphors on deadline, repeatedly, for money. You know. Writing. |
Editors, this applies to you too, while I have you: “I just fixed it” is how the person who rebuilt a collapsing chapter describes load-bearing work. The construction crew doesn’t say “we just walls.”
A translation is a book that had to be written twice. The second writer just has better manners about the credit.
The dare
Next time someone asks, try: “I’m a writer — I write other people’s books into my language.” Watch their face do the thing. That little wow they make? That’s the accurate response. Yours was the inaccurate one.
Kit for the road: “The Writer Receipts Planner” (log those rebuilt sentences), the master course “Writer (Noun): Earning A Title You Already Have,” and the free “Three Days To Claiming Your Weird Genre” — because ‘translator’ is a genre of writer, and it’s yours.
