People often ask translators about fidelity.
How close is the English to the Chinese?
Is this what the author “meant”?
How faithful is the translation?
But the longer I translate, the more I believe this: fidelity to each word is not the goal. Resonance is. And to achieve resonance, sometimes you have to rewrite.
📚 The Line That Didn’t Work – Until I Let Go
Years ago, I was translating a short story that included a line meant to express deep embarrassment, something along the lines of:
“她羞得像热锅上的蚂蚁。”
(She was as flustered as an ant on a hot wok.)
A vivid, perfectly Chinese image. But in English? It sounds a little odd. Unfamiliar. And worse – comical, in the wrong way.
I tried a few literal versions: “She was like an ant on a hot plate.” “She was scurrying like an insect in a pan.” Each one clanged.
And then I paused. I let go of the image and asked myself, What is the emotion here? What’s its texture? It wasn’t just embarrassment. It was humiliation – exposed, frantic, vulnerable. The direct English rendering was just a little too comical for the weight of the moment.
So I rewrote: She felt like every eye in the room was a flame, and she was the paper.
Was that faithful to the original metaphor? No.
Was it faithful to the emotional logic of the moment? Yes.
And that, I believe, is the translator’s deeper responsibility.
🪷 Fidelity to Form vs. Fidelity to Feeling
A garden doesn’t recreate nature. It rewrites it. Dong Qichang’s Zuibaichi, which I wrote about last week, isn’t a replica of the wilderness. It’s a curation of it – a deliberate rearranging of rock, water, and path to express a worldview shaped by Chan Buddhism. The jagged rocks, the obstructed views, the carefully placed pavilions – none of this is natural. It is crafted, and through that crafting, it conveys meaning.
This is what translation is:
Not the replication of a text, but the recomposition of its logic and resonance.
Not a mirror, but a landscape shaped to evoke a truth that can be felt across borders.
🖋️ The Translator as Gardener
In this sense, the translator is like a garden designer:
We preserve the spirit, but we reshape the form.
We follow the flow of meaning, even if the path winds differently.
We build in spaces for the reader to pause, reflect, and feel – not just to get the meaning, but to be changed by it.
And like any good garden, a translation should feel alive. If it’s stiff, literal, overly concerned with exact equivalence, it may be accurate, but it won’t speak.
🧭 What We Owe the Reader
Word for word fidelity has its place. We owe the reader truth. But that truth isn’t found only in the surface of the words – it’s found in the relationship between text, context, and reader.
Sometimes that means rewording. Sometimes it means rewriting. It always means listening.
The next time you’re tempted to measure a translation by how “close” it is, ask instead:
Does it speak?
Does it move?
Does it make you feel something true?
Because when we translate well, we don’t just transfer meaning. We rewrite the world so it can be felt again.
©2025 Shelly Bryant