Bridging Gaps, Bearing Costs

I’ve spent fifteen years paying a bill I never agreed to. It’s the cost of being fluent in two languages that should speak to each other but refuse to learn.

On one side: creative thinking. The ability to see what doesn’t exist yet, to hold ambiguity long enough for patterns to emerge, to know that the best solutions rarely arrive in the first meeting. On the other: business logic. The need for certainty, measurable outcomes, clear timelines, and decisions made yesterday.

Both are legitimate ways of understanding the world. The problem is that companies hire people like me to bridge these worlds, then act shocked when the bridge costs something to maintain.

Every time I translated a stakeholder’s vague “make it pop” into actual design requirements, I was doing unpaid labor. Every time I turned a creative team’s intuitive understanding into a business case executives could grasp, I was working for free. Every time I absorbed someone’s frustration that the other side “just doesn’t get it,” I was the shock absorber nobody budgeted for.

Think of it like being the only person in a meeting who speaks both English and French, while everyone else stubbornly refuses to learn the other language. You spend the whole meeting translating back and forth, getting blamed by both sides when they don’t like what they’re hearing, and somehow you’re the problem for not making communication happen faster.

The translation tax comes with interest charges too. There’s the emotional cost of being perpetually between worlds, never quite belonging to either. The mental exhaustion of code-switching all day. The strategic cost of spending energy on translation instead of the actual work you were hired to do.

Here’s what I learned after nine layoffs: companies don’t want to pay for bilingual talent. They want magic people who make the friction disappear without anyone having to change, learn, or grow. When that doesn’t happen - because it can’t - the translator becomes the scapegoat. Maybe if we hire a different UX person, the engineering team will finally understand user needs. Maybe if we get a better designer, the CEO will stop micromanaging pixels.

The cruel joke is that being good at translation makes you more valuable and more vulnerable at the same time. You see both sides clearly enough to know when each is being unreasonable. You care enough about the work to keep trying. And you’re positioned perfectly to take the blame when dysfunctional systems stay dysfunctional.

I kept paying the translation tax because I believed the work mattered. I thought if I could just explain it clearly enough, people would understand. If I could find the right framework, build the right vocabulary map, facilitate the right conversation - then the friction would resolve.

But the friction wasn’t a communication problem. It was a values problem. The companies that fired me didn’t want translators. They wanted silence. They wanted someone who would absorb the dysfunction, perform the emotional labor, and never name what was actually broken.

Translation is skilled work that deserves compensation, respect, and reasonable boundaries. The first step in stopping payment on a bill you never agreed to is recognizing you’ve been paying it. The second is understanding that no amount of perfect translation will fix a system that profits from keeping people divided.

If that makes me a bad fit, good. I’m fluent enough in both languages to know my worth in either one.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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