Some moments in life are not spoken — they are declared. Officially, irreversibly, and often without room for emotion. Among them is the end of a marriage. But what if we paused not at the event, but at the language that describes it?

In courtrooms and legal documents, the end of a shared life is reduced to lines of type: ‘The marriage is hereby dissolved’, ‘The parties no longer cohabitate’, ‘The relationship is irretrievably broken’. These phrases are clean. Sterile. Controlled. But they carry the weight of what was once intimacy, partnership, family.

When translating such decisions across languages, especially from Ukrainian or Russian into German or English, the difficulty lies not in vocabulary — it lies in tone. In how to carry across the unspoken. The distance between ‘Auflösung der Ehe’ (dissolution of marriage) and ‘Scheidung’ (divorce) is not legal — it’s emotional. One sounds administrative. The other sounds final.

In one such case, the court stated that ‘the marriage formally exists, but the parties no longer maintain marital relations.’ No blame. No names. Just a quiet end recorded in passive voice. From a linguistic point of view, it is a masterpiece of neutral distance. From a human point of view — an autopsy report on a bond that once breathed.

And here lies the translator’s burden: how to remain accurate while recognizing the emotional terrain behind these cold phrases. The word ‘Verhältnis’ (relationship) becomes a battlefield. ‘Wiederherstellung der ehelichen Lebensgemeinschaft’ (restoration of marital cohabitation) becomes an impossibility framed in bureaucratic terms.

But language never lies — it only reveals in layers. The silence between words, the repetition of ‘no longer’, the legal markers of what is ‘irreparable’: all these tell the story more faithfully than any adjective could.

For those who teach translation, for those who learn languages, and for those who live between them, this is a reminder: not every text speaks in the voice of its author. Some speak in the voice of absence. And it is our task to hear it.

© Tymur Levitin — Founder, Director, Senior Teacher at Levitin Language School / Start Language School by Tymur Levitin