Translucence is the property of a medium that permits the partial transmission of energy from a source, so that some but not all of the energy is dispersed, absorbed or reflected by the medium.

In a literal sense, translucence is a treated as an optical property of a material: it allows light to pass through the material only diffusely, and hence permitting the source to be seen indistinctly. In this sense, it is also called semitransparency.

Metaphorically, the term can be used to describe the clarity with which information can be distilled by a viewer, given a perspective on a scene.