…her needle… collected the green folds together… So on a summer’s day waves collect, overbalance, and fall…” — Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Woolf’s movement from the smallest human gesture to the rhythm of the sea is one of the many reminders that language works on more than one level. It’s one of the reasons I find translation so compelling. Every sentence carries traces of something larger: a voice, a context, and a purpose.
Many of the examples I’ve explored recently have come from literature and long-form writing. Yet the same questions arise in the documents that cross my desk every day. Whether I’m translating a birth certificate, a legal filing, or a chapter of a book, the work begins in the same place: understanding not only what the words say, but what they are meant to do.
From the Translation Desk
In a short story I translated, a seemingly simple description of a summer morning became an exercise in preserving memory, place, and a way of life:
“I wish summer still meant opening my eyes to a blue sky overhead and realizing I had fallen asleep on the rooftop once again… rolling over onto the rug, knowing my sister had already gathered her bedding and gone downstairs.”
On the surface, the passage describes waking up. But the details—the rooftop, the bedding, the quiet movement of a sister beginning her day—carry a larger world within them. For readers unfamiliar with this experience, sleeping on a rooftop may seem like an unusual image. For me, it immediately evokes a childhood memory: summer nights in Iran when sleeping on the rooftop was part of the rhythm of life for many families. Away from the heat of the day, families would bring their bedding outdoors, and for children, the experience carried a sense of adventure—a temporary departure from the familiar routine of sleeping in a bedroom.
Translating this scene required more than finding words that matched the original. It required understanding what those words carried: the comfort of a family tradition, the freedom of childhood summers, and the quiet intimacy of a shared memory. A translator’s work is not only to convey what happens, but to preserve why a moment matters.
Read the full translation sample →
This is true of every kind of translation. Whether a text is a family document, a legal record, or a work of literature, the translator’s responsibility begins with understanding what lies beneath the words.
In the next issue of In Context, I will look at the other half of translation: the reader. A translation does not end when words cross languages; it continues when those words begin to live in another mind.
Thank you for reading In Context.
Next issue: September 2026