Nearly three decades of translating, and one job that changed everything.
For a long time, translation was, for me, merely a craft. Work carried out among dictionaries, grammars, and pages covered in corrections. I began before the internet, before search engines, when doubt was resolved by leafing through books and a simple pencil was indispensable. I wrote, erased, rewrote. To translate was to chase the exact word.
For the first fifteen years, it was also my sole livelihood. My days were measured in pages, deadlines, and texts on the widest range of subjects. Books on theology, philosophy, contracts, manuals, reports, correspondence. Every document demanded precision, yet almost all of them ended the same way: sent to the client, invoiced, and replaced by the next job.
Translation was invisible. The better it was done, the less people noticed it.
Then, in 2007, I came to understand that words can carry far more than meaning.
That July, the country watched, stunned, the TAM flight accident in São Paulo. There were no survivors. While the news broadcast numbers, images, and analyses, another reality was being built far from the cameras: families needed to understand what had happened and seek some form of answer.
It was in that context that I was called upon to translate, from Portuguese into English, technical reports, interviews, testimonies, and various documents that would form part of the legal proceedings brought by the victims’ families.
At first glance, it would be just another project. There was technical terminology, documentary rigor, and tight deadlines, exactly as in so many others. Yet it soon became clear that those texts were not merely documents.
Each testimony, each interview, revealed an interrupted story. Parents trying to explain the absence of a child. Wives describing the emptiness left by a partner. Husbands trying to put into words a grief that seemed larger than any language could express.
Naturally, my task was not to interpret emotions. I had to preserve objectivity, maintain absolute fidelity to the original text, and avoid any personal interference. And yet it was impossible to remain unmoved.
Behind every sentence lay an entire life. Behind every date, a birthday that would never be celebrated again. Behind every name, someone who ceased to be a statistic and became a person once more.
It was then that I understood translation was never simply an exchange of words between languages. To translate, very often, is to carry a person’s truth so that it can be understood elsewhere, by other people, within another legal system, within another culture.
It is to build an invisible bridge that allows a voice to keep being heard beyond its original language.
“…good translation does not seek the spotlight. It exists so that the message may cross borders intact, preserving not only its meaning but also its dignity.
In that work, my name would never appear in the filings. No family member would know who had translated those documents. No judge would know the translator who worked silently behind the scenes. And that was exactly as it should be, for good translation does not seek the spotlight. It exists so that the message may cross borders intact, preserving not only its meaning but also its dignity.
Over nearly thirty years in this profession, I have translated thousands of pages. Many of them vanished into the routine of companies, contracts, and digital archives. Others surely contributed to important decisions whose outcomes I would never learn; only in books would the translator’s name appear, set in small type.
That 2007 assignment, however, remains alive in memory. Not because it was the most linguistically complex. Nor because it demanded an extraordinary vocabulary. It remains because it taught something no university teaches: there are moments when a translation stops being merely a technical service and becomes part of the human pursuit of justice.
Since then, I have never seen my profession the same way again.
“I believe, above all, that translating is an act of trust. Someone entrusts the translator with their ideas, their history, and, at times, their own grief, hoping it will reach the other side without being lost along the way. “
I still believe that translating demands precision, discipline, and deep respect for languages. But I believe, above all, that translating is an act of trust. Someone entrusts the translator with their ideas, their history, and, at times, their own grief, hoping it will reach the other side without being lost along the way.
That is the true nobility of translation: not the ability to know two languages, but the quiet responsibility of allowing a life to go on being understood, even when it must cross the border of words.
This article was originally written in Portuguese by James Reis and translated/adapted for our English-language blog. If you have a project that needs this kind of care, you can book a consultation with our CEO, Camila Saunier.