Building Trust in One Word Standalone Live Session Replay – August 2025 What’s the one word that defines trust for you? In this live session, Shelly shares insights from a recent informal social media survey that asked people from around the world to answer that exact question. From “honesty” and “sincerity” to more surprising responses like “chocolate” and “genes,” this session explores how trust is shaped by culture, emotion, and context. Drawing from responses across the U.S., Singapore, China, Malaysia, and the Caribbean, the session unpacks what trust means — and how differently it’s perceived — through humor, story, and cross-cultural reflection. 🧩 This session also sets the stage for The Trust Matrix™, our upcoming framework for understanding how trust is built and broken across cultures. Think of this as a warm-up — a chance to hear how others define trust before we map the terrain more formally. A perfect standalone companion to our deeper programs on language, culture, and meaning.

The translator is often described as a bridge — a connection between languages, cultures, and people. It’s an appealing metaphor: stable, neutral, necessary. But is it true? In this opening episode, Shelly Bryant challenges the simplicity of this idea. Drawing on her experience with hundreds of translations — from personal and poetic to political and seemingly impossible — she examines how translation is never just about moving words. It’s about navigating assumptions, expectations, and power. Through three guiding lenses — Politics, Poetry, and Persona — Shelly introduces the central questions of this series: What does it mean to be “faithful” in translation? How do our own shadows and stories shape the words we carry? And what kind of bridge are we really building — and for whom? This episode invites you to rethink translation as more than technique. It is a space of tension, insight, and discovery — the perfect starting point for The Translator as Bridge: Politics, Poetry, and Persona.

EPISODE 2: Darth Vader Was My Father Theme: Politics and Ideology in Translation How does ideology shape the translator’s lens — even before the work begins? In this episode, we explore how childhood propaganda, cultural narratives, and geopolitical framing shape the translator’s unconscious assumptions. Through a personal story of awakening — sparked by the Star Wars saga and the realization that the “good guys” weren’t always who we were told they were — Shelly introduces the concept of defamiliarization and examines how it works not just in literature, but in life. This episode is a reflection on the translator’s political inheritance — and the importance of questioning our defaults before we ever touch the page. 🎯 Key Ideas: How ideology shapes the translator’s internal map Why defamiliarization is essential to ethical translation What it means to “see with new eyes” — even when it’s painful Run time: approx. 15 minutes Includes archival teaching clip from earlier course

What does it mean to be faithful to a poem? In this episode, we explore the unique challenges of translating poetry — not just the technical ones, but the emotional and philosophical ones. From Su Shi’s mist-shrouded Mount Lu to the quiet ache of W. H. Auden’s The More Loving One, we ask: what gets lost in translation, and what do we lose when we try to make everything clear? This reflection goes beyond beauty and into the realm of mystery — resisting the urge to explain, and instead honoring the silence, strangeness, and ambiguity that make poetry what it is. For those curious about Auden, a separate video on that poem is linked in the program notes. Key takeaway: A translator’s task isn’t always to guide. Sometimes, it’s to protect the space where readers can get lost — and find something for themselves.

4: The Translator’s Shadow Theme: Persona, Presence, and Vulnerability We’re often told the best translator is the one you don’t notice — invisible, impartial, neutral. But in this episode, we challenge that myth. What if invisibility isn’t ethical? What if it’s just a way of hiding the translator’s power and positionality? Drawing from personal experience, this reflection traces the evolution of a translator’s voice — from striving to erase the self, to recognizing that every choice reflects who we are. Gender, background, tone, phrasing — none of these are neutral. And pretending they are can distort meaning more than it preserves it. This video invites you to rethink the ethics of translation, not as a mechanical task, but as a deeply relational act. It’s a call to awareness — and to responsibility. Key themes: Translator presence • Ethics of translation • Positionality • Gender and tone • Visibility vs. accountability

5: Faithfulness or Freedom? The Translator as Bridge: Politics, Poetry, Persona We began this series with a metaphor: the translator as bridge — linking languages, carrying meaning, offering passage. But what if that bridge isn’t always what it seems? In this final episode, we return to that image and discover its hidden fault lines. Through a striking example from classical Chinese poetry — the term 小桥 (xiao qiao, or "small bridge") — we examine how perfectly matched words can still lead to cultural misunderstanding. In English, a bridge connects. In classical Chinese verse, it often signals departure — even permanent parting. This is the translator’s paradox: what feels like connection may, in fact, conceal disconnection. And true “faithfulness” in translation may require more than fidelity to words — it may demand the humility to preserve tension, mystery, and loss. Do we owe more to the author, the reader, or the culture itself? Is faithfulness about accuracy — or about care? Featuring a return to Shelly’s earlier teaching and tying together the series’ themes of politics, poetry, and presence, this final episode asks the question at the heart of every translator’s craft: When we translate… do we choose faithfulness, or freedom?

Live Session Replay: Whose Voice is This? Redefining Faithfulness

The More Loving One – W. H. Auden A reflection on what we notice, what we neglect, and what we carry with us Channel: Between the Lines | 词境 Length: ~6 minutes We all do it — romanticize the idea of something, while neglecting to truly show up for it in real life. In this quiet, personal reflection, Shelly reads W. H. Auden’s The More Loving One in full, then shares how its gentle honesty lingers: how we claim to love the stars, yet forget to look up. This video is not a literary analysis, but an invitation. To notice what matters while it’s here. To be present, not just idealistic. And to carry that presence forward — even when the stars are hidden from view. A soft-spoken meditation on attention, memory, and the practice of loving fully. “So if you can… stop for a moment today. Look up. Look around. Be the more loving one — not just in theory, but in presence.”