Translating Vulnerability

What Language Teaches Us About Resilience

Reading Resilience and Vulnerability: Complementary or Conflicting Concepts? (Miller et al., 2010) was both fascinating and, honestly, difficult for me. Not because the article was too complex, but because I noticed something happening inside me as I started reading. There was resistance, almost a tension that wouldn’t let me go deeper into the text. I realized that before I could even try understanding the argument and the science, I first had to understand the words themselves, fully, including what they wanted to say in my own language.

As a native German speaker who has studied languages "all my life," I couldn’t help translating these concepts culturally too. In German, Verletzlichkeit (vulnerability) and Widerstandsfähigkeit (resilience) feel like total opposites. One evokes weakness, the other strength. There’s no way they could complement each other. (And these are just the main German words for the respective English terms. Sometimes there are so many German words for one English word, each with slightly different shades of meaning, that it becomes difficult to choose one.) So when I read the article’s argument that resilience and vulnerability are related but distinct—and that both are needed to understand how systems respond to change—it challenged the very way I had learned to think.

In my German mind, vulnerability means the possibility of being hurt. The word itself comes from verletzen, to wound. It’s about exposure and damage, tangible, bodily, and serious. The word itself carries a sense of injury. It implies harm has occurred or could occur. Our culture holds up sturdiness, preparedness, and reliability as virtues, so Widerstandsfähigkeit—the ability to withstand—naturally carries moral weight. So when English-language thinkers describe vulnerability as something valuable, something that is open to change, or even as beautiful, at first this feels almost impossible to grasp. 

In English, vulnerability (from Latin vulnus, also meaning “wound”) has drifted toward openness, the capacity to be affected, to let something in. It still carries the trace of the wound, but it’s no longer only about damage; it’s also about permeability and relation. The movement from “wound” to “openness” mirrors the very relationship between vulnerability and resilience: exposure enabling adaptation, healing without closing off.

I first encountered that version of vulnerability in the U.S., in a women’s circle where people spoke about “being vulnerable” as the courage to open up, to be seen, to share from the heart. That meaning didn’t exist for me in my German life, at least not in those words. In German, being verletzlich is something you hide; in English, vulnerability had somehow become the doorway to connection, how you show up. That difference is not just linguistic. It reveals a whole cultural orientation. In English, especially through people like Brené Brown, vulnerability has been reimagined as a strength of relation, not a weakness of defense.

When I finally started to move through the article, I noticed that what Miller et al. described on a systems level was actually similar to what I had experienced on a personal and cultural one. They explain that resilience and vulnerability are not opposites but dynamically linked. Resilience is the capacity to absorb disturbance and reorganize; vulnerability is the openness or exposure that makes transformation possible. The two form a cycle, like inhale and exhale.

This shifted my thinking from a linear model—first vulnerable, then resilient—to a circular one. Vulnerability reveals what is open to change, and resilience describes how that change is absorbed or transformed.

But I also have to say that English, while more flexible in blending abstract terms, often directly derived from Latin roots, sometimes annoys me too, for example, when it feels overly soft or sanitized. When wildlife managers talk about “harvesting” wolves or deer, I feel that euphemism like sand in my teeth. Excuse me? Harvesting? That’s not harvesting; that’s killing. Harvesting has to do with grain, not with killing sentient beings. In German, we would more likely say Abschuss or Bejagung—harsh, direct words that at least name what is happening. In that sense, English has a way of smoothing moral edges until they disappear, being ‘comfortingly vague’, while German can sound almost too technical or cold. Both have blind spots.

I thought about this again recently while helping my son’s sailing club winterize their boats. The kids learned to name every part of a sailboat, and one of the words was Unterliekstrecker. Another parent and I laughed, because only in German could you create a single word that so precisely describes its function. German can be descriptive, precise and clear; it builds the process right into the word. That makes it very noun-heavy and endlessly buildable... But precision has a cost. It teaches you to look for correct names and categories, to master the system before entering it. It's not natural to feel your way into it; you have to find the right word first.

Recently, especially in environmental education work, I've been leaning into the possibility that it actually doesn't matter so much to identify, categorize, and name everything correctly. Maybe what matters more (especially in this field) is what happens between words, the relational space of language where understanding grows. Highlighting connections and cause-effect, networks, nodes, and intricacies. I’ve come to realize that being in that space is where systems thinking and language really meet. Both are about noticing connections, patterns, and feedbacks. Each term only means what it means through its relationship to others, through context and exchange. Vulnerability and resilience make sense only together, in dialogue. 

That realization now influences how I approach cross-cultural and interdisciplinary work. Whether in ecology, education, or community collaboration, misunderstandings often arise not from disagreement but from different conceptual languages. We use the same words but bring different connotations to them, based on our cultures and worldviews. Recognizing this is part of what I would call a restorative focus. Paying attention, noticing potential fractures before they crack, restoring connection through shared meaning. I guess what helps is to talk more and to be vulnerable.

Miller et al. also write about collaboration between stakeholders as essential for addressing big societal challenges. No single worldview or discipline can hold the full picture of a complex adaptive system. That idea resonates deeply with what I experience through language. Just as different cultures carry different linguistic frameworks, different stakeholder groups carry different conceptual languages. Collaboration, then, is an act of translation, turning separate vocabularies of experience into shared understanding.

Learning to see vulnerability and resilience as interdependent feels like both a scientific and a cultural shift. It could also be a way of seeing life itself. To live resiliently, we must stay vulnerable. To stay vulnerable, we must stay open—to learning, to listening, to the possibility that the words we inherited might need to evolve. It reminds me that adaptation doesn’t depend on perfect definitions or fixed meanings, but on our willingness to stay in dialogue, across systems, languages, and perspectives.

Adapted from a discussion board reflection written as part of my MSc coursework on resilience and vulnerability (Miller et al., 2010, Ecology and Society 15[3]).

Reference:

Miller, Fiona, et al. “Resilience and Vulnerability: Complementary or Conflicting Concepts?” Ecology and Society, vol. 15, no. 3, 2010. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26268184. Accessed 6 Nov. 2025.