I’ve been tormenting my brain for much longer than I care to remember, trying to figure out how to separate my services into three different categories. Now, I’m asking myself why I wanted to separate them in the first place if I know that it’s an impossible feat.

Perhaps it has to do with our obsession to break down all things in life into their smallest components to understand them better, for example, to break language up into speaking and writing, and breaking that down into the smallest units of meaning – words. There are different kinds of word, for example, nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. But knowing and understanding the different kinds of word wouldn’t do any good if we didn’t know how to combine those words into meaningful phrases and sentences. The parts of a sentence can therefore only be meaningful in relation to the whole sentence.[1] And a sentence can usually only be meaningful within a bigger context.

I tend to root for the whole, more than the parts because if you break the making of a book or a story or article up into different processes, you’ll find that writing is the process of composing text for publication, translation is the process of transferring words or text from one language into another, and editing and proofreading is the process of preparing written text for publication by correcting, condensing, or otherwise modifying it.[2]

But if we look at the whole, what an astonishing thing a book is! It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance, and you are inside the mind of another person – maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.[3]

Making it practical

My very first project was to compile a traditional South African recipe book simultaneously in English and Polish. You can read more about the project here, but first, I wanted to talk about the role of translation, writing, editing, and proofreading in the making of Gogo’s Kitchen in two languages, of which I knew only one.

The English collection had to be fully written, edited and proofread; it had to be perfect before it could be translated, and that was only accomplished fourteen drafts later. Fourteen? But why?! you may well ask.

I hope you are curious enough now to read that story here.

[1] Crystal D. Discover Grammar. London: Longman, 1996.[2] Definitions mainly sourced from Oxford University Press. Oxford Dictionaries. https://premium.oxforddictionaries.com (accessed via Oxford Dictionaries Online on 17 March 2025).[3] Sagan, C. 1980. TV Series. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Episode 11 – The Persistence of Memory. https://www.organism.earth/library/document/cosmos-11 (accessed via The Library on 17 March 2025).