The translator's advantage in horror writing by reyes_mx

I spend most of my working day moving words from one language to another and trying to preserve something that isn't quite meaning and isn't quite tone but is something between them. The thing that makes a sentence feel like it was written by a particular person in a particular state of mind. I think this has made me a better horror writer than I would have been otherwise. Here's why. When you translate a ghost story, you can't just move the words. You have to understand what the fear is made of, what cultural materials the original author was working with, and then find the equivalent materials in the target language. Sometimes they don't exist and you have to build something. That process of identifying the machinery underneath the surface has become the way I approach writing horror from scratch. I start by asking: what is this fear made of? Not just the monster, not just the threat, but the specific cultural and personal materials that make this particular thing frightening. In Mexico we have a very rich tradition of this. The fear in a Rulfo story is made of completely different materials than the fear in a Shirley Jackson story, even when the surface situation is similar. Any other translators or people working across languages: do you find your translation work affects your original writing? In what ways?