Translucency is a quality whereby a material allows light to pass through it. For example, window glass is extremely translucent. Do not confuse translucency with transparency. For example, frosted glass is translucent (light passes through) but not very transparent (you can't see much besides silhouettes when looking through it).

In technical terms, translucency is the effect of a silhouetted object being cast on an object using back lighting. Using the example of looking through frosted glass, light coming from behind the glass casts a silhouette of objects behind the glass.

The root node has two attributes for controlling translucency: Translucence_Color and Translucence_Value. These attributes function identically to the Diffuse_Color and Diffuse_Value attributes. Again, the only difference between diffuse and translucent color is that the translucent light is coming from the opposite side of the object.