by Isabella Vaj – In the past ten years Isa Vaj has focused on translating literature by authors in exile: writers with a dual culture and for whom English is not their mother tongue. In this article Ms Vaj describes how translation becomes a process of sharing the personal human experience with the foreigner, thus cancelling all foreignness. The translator becomes the author’s double, inserting her own personal and cultural experience, from linguistics to language education, from archaeology to the history of Islamic art. Her encounter with the writings of Khaled Hosseini confronted her with a culture in which speech is still the main form of communication. This aspect had to be respected in the translation.