The third sentence always matters

I was translating a quiet scene last night—two people talking in a kitchen, one saying something about the weather, the other replying with a half-smile. The first two sentences were fine, functional. But the third? That’s where the weight settled. Not in what was said, but in how it wasn’t said. The pause before the word ‘always’—that’s the part that gets lost in translation. I sat with it for twenty minutes, trying to find the right silence. Sometimes I think we’re not translating words at all. We’re translating breath.