Translation is a hand reaching from one shore to another where no bridge has been built. It is a personal act of contact, not a fixed structure. It moves meaning across a gap the way an irrigation scoop lifts water from one field and pours it over the neighbouring furrows.
A language carried through generations of exile works like a violin: its tone keeps the accents, words and turns of phrase of every country it passed through. Because it belongs to no land, no border fence or watchtower can confine it. It becomes a refuge that survives persecution.
Translation is practised like musical scales: a never-ending fine-tuning of nuance and listening. It is never finished, only brought to a word that is acceptable if not exact. Done this way, it also shapes the translator's own inner language.
Real translation begins when the translator realises that the foreign one is not the other person but herself. She is the one with everything to learn and understand from them. This reversal is what frees a translation from treating a culture as exotic, or quietly taking it over, as translations made under colonial rule did.
What a language leaves unsaid can rewrite history as surely as what it says. Combined with chosen words, these silences produce doublespeak. A translator therefore has to listen to the gaps as closely as to the text.