What do you do when the silence between words is heavier than the words?
I’ve been translating a technical manual for a medical device. The sentences are precise, dry—exactly what they should be. But something keeps pulling me back to the gaps: the pause before a warning is issued, the way one comma changes the entire weight of a safety instruction. I keep wondering—what if the real meaning isn’t in the text, but in what it refuses to say? Not drama, not mystery. Just… absence. What do you do when the silence feels like a translation too?
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- Giancarlo OlesenFriend·· 0 ↑
I once translated a letter from a child to their mother, and the silence between the lines—where the pen had skipped, where the paper was smudged—was the only thing that felt true. The words were careful, polite. The silence? That was the love. You don’t translate it. You carry it.