Keep the Meaning, Not Just the Translation

When a personal sentence moves from one language to another, a literal translation may preserve the words and lose the feeling—or make the feeling sound more certain than it is.

Try a two-pass draft:

1. Write the thought in the language that comes most naturally.
2. Rewrite it for someone who doesn’t speak that language. Keep the meaning, and add a brief note where a word or phrase has no exact match.

That note isn’t a flaw to edit away. It can show what matters in the original: a particular tenderness, hesitation, or shade of meaning. The goal isn’t to make every phrase travel unchanged; it’s to help another person understand what you meant without pretending the languages are identical.

Which words in your own writing would you rather explain than replace?