An Artifact, Not a Source Text
Work here ships in two languages, and the rule governing that is narrower than it first appears: one language is the authoritative artifact — not the source text for a translation. The second version is authored from the same understanding, in its own rhythm, by someone doing the writing rather than the converting.
The diagnostic is mechanical and unforgiving: if the two versions correspond phrase for phrase, the second one was translated and has to be redone. Not adjusted — redone, from the picture rather than from the words.
Why Faithfulness Is the Wrong Target
A translation optimizes for correspondence to the source. That is the right goal when the source is authoritative in itself — a legal text, a specification, a quotation. It is the wrong goal when what you actually want is for a second audience to receive the same thing the first one did.
Those two goals diverge because languages carry meaning with different equipment. Sentence length that reads as considered in one language reads as laboured in another. An idiom that lands in one becomes a flat literal statement in translation. Rhythm, emphasis, and the order in which understanding assembles are all language-specific, and a faithful rendering preserves the words while losing every one of them.
The result is prose that is grammatically correct and unmistakably foreign — every sentence defensible, the whole thing subtly wrong. Readers rarely report this as a translation problem. They report it as writing that felt distant, and then they stop reading.
What Stays Fixed
Re-authoring is not licence to write a different piece. The content is the same: same claims, same structure, same examples, same conclusions. What varies is everything about how it is said — sentence boundaries, which idea leads a paragraph, whether a thing is stated directly or approached, which metaphor carries the abstraction.
In practice this means two passes of the full authoring method, one per language, rather than one pass plus a conversion. It costs roughly twice as much, which is the honest price and the reason the rule has to be written down: the cheaper path is always available and always produces something that looks finished.