Bridges are useful things. They stop big boats from going too far, they provide a useful support for locking up your ostensibly-forever-but-probably-just-more-of-a-fling love, and they provide a nice vantage point for taking photos of big boats backing up after realizing they can’t go any further.

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And they also allow things to move from one side of a waterway to another. Or, in a metaphorical sense, from one isolated place to another. Now, the Romans were quite adept at building bridges, to keep legions, goods, and Russell Crowe moving across the rivers and streams of their vast empire. And perhaps it was that cultural keenness for connection that prompted them to view the moving of meaning from one language to another in a similar fashion. Our word translation is indeed a borrowing, via Old French, of the Latin past participle translatus, meaning “carried over”.

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So when we speak of translating between languages, we can imagine the meaning imbued in one language’s utterances being carried over into another. And, much like legions, goods and a middle-age-spreading Russell Crowe, this meaning can’t simply vault between the two sides – it needs a foundation over which to move. And that foundation, that bridge – so often tread upon without a moment’s reflection – is the translator, or less eloquently, the carrier-overer.

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Hence the reason behind this blog. I’d like to offer you a glimpse under the bridge, a lair of trolls and translators alike, into just what goes on when a work is translated from an inaccessible “other side” into the linguistic and cultural vantage point you’re comfortably reading from right now.