The critic George Steiner defined intimacy as "confident,
quasi-immediate translation," a state of increasingly one-to-one
correspondence in which "the external vulgate and the private mass of
language grow more and more concordant." Translation, he explained,
occurs both across and inside languages.
You are performing a feat of
interpretation anytime you attempt to communicate with someone who is
not like you.
-- Lauren Collins. "Love In Translation" New Yorker
(August 8 & 15, 2016 Issue).