Why I Always Translate My Own Essays

On Slow Thinking and Translation as a Philosophical Method

We live in an age where almost everything revolves around speed. We are expected to read faster, work faster, respond faster, and arrive at our destinations more quickly. Technology promises ever shorter paths to knowledge while perhaps making the path to understanding longer.

That is why there is something almost old-fashioned about translating an essay.

When I began publishing my essays in both Norwegian and English, I assumed that translation was simply the final stage of the writing process. First you write the text. Then you translate it.

Gradually, I discovered that the opposite was true.

Translation was not the end of the work. It was the beginning of a new conversation with the text.

Many people think of translation as a technical task. Words are transferred from one language to another without losing their meaning. Yet anyone who has tried to translate a philosophical essay knows that it is rarely that simple. Words can be translated. Human experience cannot always be.

It is only when a text begins to live in another language that it starts asking questions of its own author.

Suddenly, repetitions become visible. A sentence that sounded precise in Norwegian becomes awkward in English. A concept that once seemed self-evident reveals unexpected layers of meaning. Not because the translation is poor, but because the new language asks questions that the old one allowed to pass unnoticed.

I have therefore begun to read my own essays as though they had been written by someone else.

The Norwegian text no longer represents the final truth. It becomes one of several possible expressions of the same experience. The English translation answers back. Sometimes it objects. Sometimes it expresses the thought more clearly than the original. Then I return to the Norwegian text and rewrite it.

In this way, translation becomes part of the thinking itself.

Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that understanding is always a new act of interpretation. No text simply repeats its original meaning. It encounters new readers, new questions, and new horizons. I believe the same happens when a text encounters a new language. It returns to its point of departure, but it never returns unchanged.

What has surprised me most is how often the English version has improved the Norwegian original.

Not because English is a richer language than Norwegian, but because the two languages organize experience differently.

When I write about an opplevelse, the word is usually translated as experience. That immediately makes me wonder whether I actually meant erfaring instead. Norwegian distinguishes between these two concepts. An opplevelse is something lived in the moment. An erfaring is the lasting understanding that remains after the moment has passed. English expresses both through the same word: experience. Translation therefore forces me to think once again about what I really mean.

The same happens with the Norwegian word ydmykhet. The closest English equivalent is humility, yet English also distinguishes clearly between humility and humiliation. One points toward voluntary modesty; the other toward degradation and shame. Here, too, translation reminds me that words carry different philosophical and cultural nuances.

Between languages, a dialogue emerges.

Not about grammar, but about meaning.

Perhaps this is true of more than language.

Perhaps all understanding is a form of translation.

Martin Heidegger describes understanding as an Entwurf—a projection into a horizon in which we already stand. We never simply repeat what we already know. We carry it forward into a new context. When we seek to understand another person, we translate that person's experience into our own language. When we read philosophy, we translate old ideas into our own time. When we read our old diaries or forgotten manuscripts, we translate an earlier life into the person we have become.

None of these translations is ever complete.

Yet all of them are necessary.

Perhaps that is why dialogue has always fascinated me more than conclusions. In dialogue, translation is constantly taking place—not only between words, but between experiences, life stories, and meanings. Every time we truly listen to another human being, our own horizon shifts ever so slightly.

This, I believe, is what happens when an essay is translated.

The text changes its language.

But the author also changes perspective.

In this way, translation has taught me something that reaches far beyond language itself.

It has taught me to think more slowly.

In our time, quick answers are often taken as signs of intelligence. Yet the most important questions in a human life rarely yield to quick answers. They must be read again, thought through again, and sometimes translated before they begin to reveal their meaning.

For me, translating an essay has therefore become a small form of meditation.

Not an escape from the world, but an exercise in being fully present with words.

I no longer translate my essays simply to make them available to more readers.

I translate them in order to understand them more deeply.

Perhaps it is only when a text has lived in two languages that it discovers what it truly wanted to say.

Perhaps it is only when a text has lived in two languages 

that it discovers what it truly wanted to say.

This essay was written in a conversation with ChatGPT and Claude