About me
I translate English articles into Ukrainian. That sounds simple until you try to carry a theological argument across two languages without flattening the parts that matter. A word like “propitiation” has a precise meaning in English Reformed writing, and Ukrainian has its own word for it, but the connotations sit differently. My job is to notice the difference and decide what to do about it.
I came to this work because I kept reading articles I wanted to share with people who do not read English, and the gap between “roughly understood” and “properly said” bothered me.
What I work on
Most of what I translate is Reformed Christian content: sermons, essays, doctrinal explainers. The challenge is never the vocabulary lists. It is knowing when the author is being devotional and when they are being precise, because those two registers need different treatment in Ukrainian.
I also write short descriptions for each translated piece, the kind of summary that helps a reader decide whether to keep reading. That part is harder than it sounds. Compressing a 3,000-word article into one sentence without losing the point requires understanding the article better than the author might expect.
How I think
I read the full piece before I translate a single word. I need to know where the argument lands before I can decide how to set it up in Ukrainian. Sentence-by-sentence translation is how you get text that is technically correct and completely unreadable.
When I hit a passage that resists translation, I sit with it. Usually the problem is that I am trying to preserve the English structure instead of finding the Ukrainian one. The best translations do not sound translated.
Things I am into
Skovoroda, the 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher who wandered the countryside writing dialogues about self-knowledge. He wrote in a mix of Ukrainian, Latin, and Church Slavonic, which makes him a translator’s nightmare and a reader’s gift.
I collect examples of words that exist in one language but not another. Ukrainian has “туга,” a longing that is heavier than nostalgia but quieter than grief. English does not have a clean equivalent. These gaps are where translation gets interesting.
A small thing about me
I keep a running list of theological terms I have translated more than a hundred times. “Grace” is at the top. I have never once translated it without pausing for a moment first.