Hi, I’m Danica. I’m a translator.
My job title may say “open source developer relations,” but, day-to-day, translator is a more accurate description.
I translate between two worlds that care about the same thing but talk about it in completely different languages: open source. And I’ve come to believe that the presence or absence of people doing this translation work is one of the biggest factors in whether corporate engagement in open source foundations and projects succeeds or fails.
Two languages
The two languages exist because each side is prioritizing different things, and how they discuss open source is through the lens of those priorities.
Corporations are going to discuss open source in terms of what’s good for the business. This is unsurprising. They care about things like risk reduction, talent pipeline, ecosystem influence, strategic positioning, and competitive differentiation. When someone inside a company advocates for open source investment, they’re making the case in this language. Why wouldn’t they? It’s the language that gets budget approved.
On the other hand, open source communities speak in terms of what’s good for the project/community; they care about contributions, project stewardship, governance, and public good. Their goal is to keep the project healthy and grow sustainable communities.
Now, the priorities of both sides aren’t necessarily opposed. A company reducing its dependency risk by contributing upstream can also be stewarding the project. A community member building credibility in a project can also be building their company’s strategic position. The outcomes often align, but the languages don’t map to each other automatically. This means that when folks on one side hear the other side’s language, they often either misread the intent or just… don’t understand.
A corporate leader hears “project participation” and might think “overhead,” and a project maintainer hearing “strategic positioning” might think “exploitation.” Each side will have reasons to support their own interpretation.
In order to preserve trust, someone is needed to bridge the gap between how each side frames the same activity: a translator.
The translator role
So who is taking on the critical role of translator?
On the corporate side, translators exist in OSPOs, as open source developer advocates, and as engineering leaders who’ve spent time in communities and understand what impacts trust. In their role as a translator, they take community needs and translate them into business language so that leadership will support and fund the work. They also translate business decisions and actions back to the community in a way that doesn’t sound like a press release.
Meanwhile, on the community side, the translators are corporate representatives on foundation boards, corporate-affiliated (and perhaps -funded) committers who drive projects or who’ve earned governance seats, and project leaders who have lived both sides and understand how companies make decisions and can work with that rather than against it.
An important note about translators. Their job isn’t just to find synonyms. It’s to protect the substance of what each side actually needs while expressing it in language the other side will recognize. Good translation reveals alignment that was always there but invisible when each side only spoke to itself.
Where translation can break
Both roles can be fragile.
Within corporate open source, translators are vulnerable to the same forces that make all open source engagement fragile, e.g. shifting OSPO funding and reorgs. The translation function is often the first to go because it’s the hardest to measure—the value is in what it prevents (misunderstandings, credibility loss, community friction) rather than what it produces on a dashboard.
And, looking at the function from the community angle, getting to the point where you can serve as a translator takes time. First, you need trust that’s built over years of sustained, visible participation in a community. Then, you need experience on the corporate side and an understanding of how companies actually make decisions. And, finally, you need to be in a position where you can actually bridge the two, whether that’s a governance seat, a foundation board role, or simply being known as a person who can serve in this capacity for the community.
That combination is rare. And when a community loses someone who had it—or when a company pulls its people out of a project—there’s not always someone who can step up immediately and backfill the role.
Why the translator matters
Without translators, both sides are left to interpret the other through the limited scope of their own lens, meaning that the things that might be perfectly rational in one language could come across as careless or even hostile in the other. Nobody is carrying the story across the gap, and the collaboration that actually happens becomes invisible.
I think about this a lot. My job is to be fluent enough in both languages that I can help each side understand the other’s constraints, motivations, and values. It’s not glamorous work, and it doesn’t produce viral content or measurable pipeline. But I know that when the translation layer is healthy and both sides have people who can bridge the gap, folks are happy and things actually move forward.
If you’re doing translation work in either direction, tell me! I’d love to hear what it looks like for you.
Interested in more writing on open source engagement? I write about it here.