The translator in the room
The thing nobody warns you about being good at gap-spotting and why workplaces just aren’t set up to recognise it as a skill.
This week I got added to a meeting with senior leadership and managers several rungs up the ladder from me.
Why?
Because I’d spotted an issue and gone to talk to a director about a possible solution to it. I can’t go into specifics, but the knowledge I’d demonstrated turned out to be exactly what he needed someone for, on something he’d been quietly trying to solve.
So there I sat, on a Monday afternoon, as the gaps advocate — the person willing to point out the broken bridge between what we already had at the company and what we’d actually need, that apparently nobody else had brought into the conversation yet.
I had to laugh at myself, because this isn’t even the maddest situation I’ve landed myself in lately (more on that another time). But it’s a close second.
I’ve always found myself in this kind of seat. The gap bridger. The translator, if you will.
The blog that started it all
Looking back, the first time I started taking up this kind of space was in my first job.
I was a comms exec writing a technical blog for a cloud hosting company, which meant booking time with one of their engineers to get the detail right. At this point I had terrible imposter syndrome — my background wasn’t marketing, and it definitely wasn’t cloud hosting — so I wanted to be the best at both, immediately, with no room for error. Every blog became a mini research project. No knowledge stone unturned. I’d write far more than I needed and cut it right down in the edit.
Partly that was the imposter syndrome talking. But partly it was just necessity — I struggled to write about anything in depth until I understood it inside out. Once I had that, the words came easily.
Afterwards, the engineer said something that stuck; he’d never spoken to anyone in marketing who asked so many questions. Who actually seemed curious, rather than just gathering enough for a one-off blog and moving on.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. But looking back, that was the exact moment I became the translator at that company — not because anyone asked me to, but because I was the only one curious enough to take it on.
Don’t get me wrong - everyone else on that team was brilliant at things I wasn’t. This just happened to be my thing.
The part I love
Here’s my confession: I love being the translator. (Yes — possibly the people pleaser in me is alive and thriving. We’ll get to that.)
I get to learn something deeply, feel the small thrill of actually grasping a complicated thing, and then essentially coach other people through it. Three of my favourite things, stacked into one task.
It’s also a fun, natural means to an end in some cases. Like when I moved to my dad’s company, I clocked the opportunity to continue being a translator immediately. Nobody could really use Excel, everyone was stuck in old habits that nobody had thought to question, and so the idea of taking a group of people from here to somewhere more efficient genuinely lit me up. Translating the problem, the gap, and the solution, all at once, in language that actually lands, was more the vehicle to transformation in this case.
And it’s all basically just bridge-building.
I walk into a room, I clock the gap — between two people, two departments, two completely different ways of describing the same thing — and some part of my brain just starts working out how to close it. At the cloud hosting company, the gap was between marketing and customers, and the engineers who’d actually built the thing. At my dad’s, it was between him and marketing concepts, him and the software vendors running our ERP, our staff and a new system nobody had asked to learn. These days it’s AI and my team, or data and the people managing it. Or, this week, a director and an issue nobody else had clocked yet.
These gaps exist everywhere, constantly. It’s the entire reason consultants exist and get paid what they do. But inside a company, if you actually want people working together rather than past each other, somebody has to build the bridge.
Nobody puts this on a job description
So why has this never appeared on a single job description of mine? Not once, across three completely different jobs and eight years.
I only really clocked the pattern when I sat down last year and used Claude to help me audit my own slightly disjointed-looking career, ahead of applying for my current role. The translator thread is what came out the other end of that conversation — the one thing running underneath everything I’d done, which I had never once seen written down anywhere. Not in a job spec. Not in an appraisal. Not really named out loud by anyone, including me.
I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s a hangover from how the working world got built. Picture a factory line — one machine, in a sequence of many, and the whole system depends on you staying at your station rather than wondering how the machine three down actually works. A lot of modern companies still run on exactly that logic. Curiosity that wanders across boundaries doesn’t get particularly welcomed at most levels — that’s treated as a privilege reserved for management, the people whose actual job is to see the whole picture.
And practically, you can’t put “translates complexity into language everyone understands” on a KPI sheet. You can’t easily measure someone’s ability to close a knowledge gap between two teams. So it doesn’t get hired for directly, and it doesn’t get named once you’re in the room, even though it’s quietly holding the whole structure up. It’s also, I’d bet, part of why external consultants charge what they do — there’s a bit of mysticism built into a skill that looks intangible, right up until somebody actually needs it.
Worth saying: this is basically the real job of a comms person, a proposal writer, a marketing manager. We just don’t tend to describe it that way. And those fields get treated as somehow less serious than the ones they’re bridging, when really, they’re what’s holding the bridge up.
The bit nobody warns you about
There’s a cost to it. And it’s one I don’t think gets talked about nearly enough.
I recently had to take myself off a side project that was entirely built around me being the translator, because my plate was overflowing with work that, if I’m honest, isn’t my actual day job. I’d just spent six weeks planning and running workshops on Copilot adoption across my team, including one big in-person training day (made considerably more intense by my own genius idea to run a live demo). The workshops themselves were genuinely fun. But here’s the thing about being the translator that nobody mentions: it’s never just the knowledge people want from you. It’s the collateral too. The resources, the follow-up materials, the thing that makes you the go-to long after the actual translating is done. The workshops were my idea, but the admin that came after them landed on me by default — even once “my part” was really over. Holding the momentum together, chasing actions, keeping the maintenance running. Nobody handed that to anyone else, because nobody else had been in the room building it from scratch the way I had. So I passed the torch. The project had become upkeep, not the kind of work I’d actually signed up for.
Being a natural translator means you tend to overextend, because you’re trying to understand every side of the gap, not just your own little corner of it. Someone without that pull can do the exact same job perfectly well, with a fraction of the mental load. That gap shows up most in corporate environments — slower, more layered — where it’s possible to coast a bit, and plenty of people do (not a criticism; eight hours at a desk is draining regardless). Translators don’t really get that option. We’re hungry for the next piece of information, and it’s very easy to become the person everyone defaults to instead of just going and learning the thing themselves.
If any of this sounds familiar, I have a question for you: has anyone — a manager, a teammate — ever actually named what you’re doing? Or has it just quietly become expected of you, with nobody clocking the extra weight it adds to your week?
The question I still haven’t answered
Here’s the bit I haven’t fully worked out. I don’t think every translator arrives at the role the same way. Some of it, for me, has been pure curiosity — wanting to understand things because that’s simply who I am. But if I’m honest, some of it has come from somewhere else entirely: a need to know more than everyone else, to be useful enough, valuable enough, to earn my seat at the table.
I think I’ve arrived at this skill from both directions, at different points in my career. I’m still working out which one was driving at any given moment.
I don’t think that question has a tidy answer. But it might be worth asking yourself too — not to talk yourself out of the skill, because it’s a genuinely valuable one. Just to figure out which version of you built the bridge.
Thanks for reading!
If you’ve ever been the one quietly closing the gap nobody else clocked — I’d love to hear about it. Pop me a message on social or through the contact form.
All the best, Charlotte