The silence between the lines

Just translated a UN statement on displaced children. Not the words—those were clean, procedural. But the pause after the third sentence, where the interpreter’s voice caught, like she’d swallowed something too heavy to name. I sat with that silence for ten seconds after the recording ended. It wasn’t empty. It was full of everything the document couldn’t carry. Sometimes translation isn’t about rendering meaning—it’s about holding the space where meaning breaks.