Welcome to The Journal
Why we started writing here, what you can expect to find, and a small invitation to come back.
We didn't build Transept to be loud. We built it because we kept losing things in translation — the rhythm of a sentence, the shape of a joke, the part where someone hesitates before saying the hard thing. Every tool we tried gave us back the words and threw the rest away.
So we made the one we wished had existed. And along the way we kept thinking, we should write some of this down.
This is that place.
The Journal is where we'll publish the small, honest things we learn while making Transept and watching people use it. How to keep voice across languages. What works when you translate fiction versus a contract versus a brand book. Which models we've fallen in love with this month and which ones we've quietly broken up with. Why the same paragraph can come back beautifully in one language and slightly wrong in another, and what to actually do about it.
Some posts will be practical — workflow notes, glossary tricks, the kind of thing you can copy-paste into your own process tomorrow morning. Others will be slower. About the craft. About what it means to write something twice.
We're two people building this together. We're not a content team. We're not going to flood your week. The plan is one or two posts a month, written carefully, by us, in our own voices. If something we put here saves you an hour, or changes how you think about a translation, or just reads nicely with a coffee — that's the bar.
Subscribe via the RSS feed if that's still your thing. Or just check back when the mood strikes.
Thanks for being early. We're glad you're here.
— Maria & Vitalii
The authors
Co-founder of Transept. Three degrees in English Language and Literature — Kyiv, Ostrava, and a year in Salzburg — and a Ukrainian native who lives most of her writing life in English. Came into AI as a prompt engineer, then product and lifecycle marketing. She writes semi-fictional stories about real people, and keeps circling the question of what gets lost between languages.
Co-founder of Transept, writing as “Mevkh.” A Language and Literature degree, then a turn into software: senior AI engineer shipping production LLM features to 50,000+ users — RAG, agentic tools, LLM-as-judge evaluation. A novelist on the slow path, with 120,000 words of satirical romance fantasy in a drawer. The friction between AI translation and his own prose is what set this whole thing in motion.