The Unglamorous Work of Making Practice Portable
I’ve spent years living between languages and landscapes. Not so much the ones I speak and more the ones I work in. There’s the language of practice that can be granular, contextual and alive with the texture of what actually happens when you try something. And there’s the language of pattern: abstract, portable, the version that travels beyond the room where it was born.
Good practitioners speak the first fluently, do the work, sense when something’s off, and adjust in real time. Good translators can bridge to the second in helping others learn from practice without reducing it into formula. The hardest job, the one I keep finding myself doing, is staying bilingual: close enough to practice to keep it honest, distant enough to make it legible to people who weren’t in the room.
Translation is unglamorous work that is mostly about fidelity in staying true to what happened while making it comprehensible to someone who doesn’t share your context. While you lose something in every translation, the question is whether what survives the crossing is still worth the trip.
“Translation means doing violence upon the original, means warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes. So then where does that leave us? How can we conclude, except by acknowledging that an act of translation is then necessarily always an act of betrayal?”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel
Years ago, I was translating between platform logic and publishing tradition. I thought I’d made the shift legible by documenting the reasoning, built the scaffolding, walked people through the steps. But translation and adoption aren’t the same thing. I left and later, a funder arrived who spoke both languages natively, and the idea took root. There was sadness in that, and a familiar ache about who gets written into the story. I learned then what I’m still learning: usefulness and visibility are different currencies and translators rarely get the byline, but the work doesn’t travel without them.
What makes translation hard is that you’re always code-switching. When you’re with practitioners, you speak in specifics. Often about the things that went wrong, the small bets that didn’t land and the texture of a conversation that shifted everything. When you’re with people who need the pattern, you have to abstract: What’s the insight here? What’s portable? What can someone in a completely different context learn from this?
The risk is that you abstract too much and lose the thing that made the practice matter in the first place. Or you stay too granular and the learning never leaves the room. I’ve done both. The practice is finding the right distance at which you can be close enough to smell the petrichor yet far enough to see the weather system.
Writing helps, not as performance, but as the discipline that keeps translation honest. Writing drags ambiguity into the light without pretending it’s resolved. It shows your priors, what shifted, and why the next step might be smaller (or bolder) than the last. It’s how you make your thinking visible to yourself first, and to others second. It slows you down just enough to catch when you’re translating someone else’s experience into your preferred narrative instead of staying faithful to what actually happened.
There’s also something about rhythm. Translation can’t be a one-time event and has to be a practice, a sādhanā. You translate, someone tries it, something breaks or works in a way you didn’t expect, and then you translate again with more texture. The unglamorous part is the repetition: Are we repeating to deepen the insight, or just to reassure ourselves we understood it the first time? Are we making practice more portable, or just more comfortable to talk about?
I think about this especially in philanthropy, where translation often curdles into control. Funders want pattern before practice has had time to breathe. They want dashboards when what’s needed is witnessing as sustained attention to what’s actually unfolding. The temptation is to translate prematurely: to turn a tentative insight into a theory of change, a learning moment into a lesson, a question into an answer. The discipline is staying in the question longer, translating less, letting practice accumulate its own weight before you try to lift it into language others can carry.
What I’m learning to do, not perfectly, but more consistently, is ask two questions before I translate anything:
What’s at stake if this doesn’t travel? Sometimes the answer is “not much” because it was useful in this context, but forcing it to be portable would strip out what made it work. Let it stay local. Other times, the answer is “a lot” and this is an insight that could help people avoid repeating a mistake, or unlock something they’re stuck on. Then translation is worth the cost.
Can I stay faithful to the source? This means: Do I understand the practice well enough to translate it without distorting it? Have I spent enough time in the room, close enough to the work, that I can name what mattered without projecting what I wish had mattered? If the answer is no, the right move is to stay quiet or stay longer and not to translate prematurely and pass off partial understanding as pattern.
The work now is to be more honest about the limits of translation. Some things don’t survive the crossing, and that’s okay. Some insights are meant to stay embedded in the relationships and contexts that generated them. Trying to force them into portable language makes them hollow rather than useful.
And some things do translate beautifully, but only if you’re willing to do the slow work of finding the right distance, checking your fidelity, revising when someone tells you “that’s not quite it,” and accepting that the translated version will never be as rich as the original.
What I keep coming back to: translation is an act of service, not authority. The goal isn’t to be the one who names the pattern but to make the pattern legible enough that others can use it, challenge it, refine it, or discard it based on their own practice. If I’ve done the work well, the translated version should help people return to their own practice with sharper questions and not replace their practice with my answers.
Originally published on Substack on 20 October 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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