What Gets Lost Between the Brief and the Translation
A client sends across three paragraphs in English and asks for the French back by five. The literal version can come back in minutes — every word accounted for, nothing missing, nothing added — and it still reads wrong. Not incorrect. Wrong the way a translated menu is wrong: technically true, and nobody would actually say it that way.
The brief survives the sentence, not the other way around
The instinct, especially under a deadline, is to protect the sentence: keep the clause order, keep the emphasis, keep the metaphor if there's a metaphor. That instinct is backwards. What a brief actually asks for is an effect — persuade this person, reassure this reader, make this policy sound humane instead of bureaucratic — and the sentence is just the vehicle that happened to deliver that effect in the source language. French doesn't front-load the way English does. Arabic doesn't take passive voice kindly. A sentence that keeps its exact shape across three languages is, more often than not, a sentence that has quietly given up on doing its job in two of them.
We ask one question before touching a brief, in any of the three languages we work in: what is this text actually trying to make the reader do, feel, or believe? Everything downstream — word choice, sentence length, whether a joke survives or gets replaced with a different joke that actually lands — answers to that question, not to the source sentence.
Where the shortcuts genuinely save time
None of this is an argument against speed. A press release with a hard 6pm deadline doesn't get the luxury of three drafts and an afternoon to sit with them. What it gets instead is a fifteen-minute conversation before anyone opens a document: who is this for, what do they already believe, what's the one line that has to survive no matter what else gets cut. That conversation is the actual translation work. Typing out the French is what happens after it, and it goes fast precisely because the hard decisions already got made out loud, together, instead of alone and silently inside a first draft.
The version that arrives and reads like it was written for a French reader, not translated at one, is doing exactly what the client asked for — it's just that what they asked for was never really "the French." It was "make this land the way it landed for me." That's the brief. The sentence is only ever the deliverable.