Every article we translate ships with three things attached: a translated title, a translated body, and a description — a short Ukrainian excerpt, capped at about 200 characters, that the website uses on the listing page. For a long time we treated all three as the same kind of work. They are not.
The title and the body are translation. The description is something else. Once we started treating it as something else, both got better.
What translation does
When we render the body of an article into Ukrainian, our job is to preserve. The author chose specific words to make a specific argument. We render that argument with the same precision, the same tone, the same structure. If the source writes a ninety-word sentence with three subordinate clauses, our Ukrainian version respects the shape of that sentence — even when Ukrainian word order makes the result feel longer or shorter than the original. Our license is small. We substitute idioms, adjust passive constructions, and convert scripture references to the Ukrainian Bible’s chapter-verse format. We do not decide what the author is trying to say.
This discipline is what makes a translation trustworthy. A reader who knows the author’s English work should be able to recognize the same voice in the Ukrainian version. If they can’t, we have drifted.
What the excerpt does
The description is not bound by the source text. It is bound by the website’s listing page.
A reader scanning the homepage sees the article title and a one-sentence summary. They have three seconds to decide whether to click. The summary’s job is not to “represent” the article — it is to surface the one idea most likely to make this specific reader stop scrolling. That is a different question from “what does this article say.”
Most articles say more than one thing. A 3,000-word piece on union with Christ might discuss the doctrine’s biblical foundations, its pastoral implications, and its place in Reformed history. The body translation has to carry all three threads faithfully. The excerpt can pick one. It can leave the other two unmentioned. It can rephrase the chosen thread in language the original author never used.
This is the part that took the longest to accept. The excerpt is not a miniature of the article. It is an invitation written for a different audience — readers who have not read the article yet, and who will only read it if the invitation works.
Why we write it last
We used to write the description from the article’s introduction, before the body was fully translated. That felt efficient — get the metadata done while the model is fresh — but it consistently produced worse results. Introductions often preview structure (“In this essay we will consider three reasons…”) rather than landing the article’s strongest claim. An excerpt drawn from the intro reads like a table of contents.
Now we write the excerpt after the body translation is done. By that point we know what the article actually argues — not what it promises in the first paragraph, but what it actually delivers by the last. The excerpt comes from the strongest sentence in the piece, often something from the middle or the conclusion, distilled to under 200 characters of Ukrainian that can stand alone.
The order matters: translate first, summarize second. Trying to summarize an article you have not fully translated is guessing.
When the excerpt and the body disagree
Occasionally the strongest sentence in an article makes a claim that, on its own, sounds stronger or more controversial than the article as a whole. The body, with all its qualifications and footnotes, says something nuanced. The excerpt, stripped of those qualifications, says something blunter.
This is where the difference between translation and summary becomes a working constraint rather than a preference. The excerpt must be faithful to the article’s actual claim, not just its loudest sentence. If extracting a sentence requires dropping a qualifier that materially changes its meaning, we do not use that sentence — even if it would make a better hook. The excerpt is allowed to be selective. It is not allowed to misrepresent.
Translation has a clear test: does the Ukrainian say what the English says? The excerpt has a harder one: would the author, reading this summary, recognize it as fair? When the answer is no, we rewrite — not the article, the summary.
One artifact, two crafts
The output we hand back to the pipeline is a single document with three fields in it. From the outside, it looks like one piece of work. From the inside, the title and body are the product of one discipline — careful, conservative, faithful to the source — and the description is the product of a second discipline — selective, persuasive, written for a reader who has not arrived yet.
Confusing the two is what causes a translation to drift toward marketing copy, or a summary to read like a footnote. Keeping them separate is what lets each one do its job.