Daniel Mendelsohn offers commentary on the problems and practice of translation not unrelated to the discussion held here a few weeks back:
But simply to convey what Homer’s words mean gives no sense of the real challenge that the translator faces, which is to think of ways to reproduce the wonderful sound effects Homer contrives here to evoke the sounds of the sea.
This is a problem more with poetry than prose, perhaps, but it is still present in the translation of anything that aspires to beauty, or at least to an aesthetic: how do you balance capturing the meaning inherent in the words with the meaning inherent in the form?
Parsimony — and a willingness to retranslate, to convey as best you can in a different tongue. “Her eyes were ocean-blue” is a sentence that conveys what “aoi” means as related to eyes (and translating it as sea-green would be actively wrong, though that’s the more common english metaphor).Report