> Translation is simply the art of taking something in one language and expressing it accurately in another.
This article seems to adequate translation with adaptation, which is the crux of the issue I think.
In one case you might want to convey the exact words expressed regardless of the nuances, social context and "making it sound right". Your primary goal is to convey information, however clumsy it can feel as a result.
On the other case, you'll want the reader/listener to feel like a native person is talking to them, adapting to their reference frame, sacrificing accuracy to properly convey the spirit of the words.
I think it comes down to how much entertainment is expected from the result, if it's for research purpose for instance, accuracy will prime.
If, as I think is the main goal of the author, it's "to prevent that person in front of you from subjecting you to a sad, pitying look", fully adapting is surely the way to go.
> Your primary goal is to convey information, however clumsy it can feel as a result.
> if it's for research purpose for instance, accuracy will prime.
That explains couple weird behaviors I've seen regarding translations. Right, right... Translation is like, you have two distinct interpreter machines, and the input for one, that you want to run on the other. You must ensure the output of both machines to match. "Accuracy" pursued, as you used, is literally a "garbage in" situation. This is what creates so called "engrish" hilarity as well, a lot of them are actually "accurate", yet nonsensical. "Please have distant considerations on photography at this location" is an "accurate" translation for a typical sign in a certain language into English. Make a guess as to what it is supposed to mean.
Translations must result in the same understanding, retaining the effect. That applies to every translations. "Accurate translations" that crash the machine or make it misbehave simply are of no use.
Yes, it's always tricky. I think an alternative point where translators go for accuracy, everything else be damned, is for cultural artifacts and specialized language.
For instance when reading programming books, having english words like "core dump" need to either be translated in the exact matching technical word in the target language (which the reader might actually not understand better than "core dump"...english is my second language and I have no idea what it should be officially called in my mother tongue...), or be kept in english. Going for an approximation that conveys the feeling won't be useful to the reader.
The same sometimes applies to real word conversation translations where the speaker mixes and matches languages (engrish being part of that). Translating the engrish or the foreign words used in the speech (in particular when the foreign words come from the very language we're trying to translate into) will make it more difficult to understand for the reader, especially if they could have understood the nuances of the original script.
I think of this when I see the english "déjà-vu" translated into french: it will often be left untouched with some signage to convey it was in the original script as is, and it would be worse to have it translated for more immersion or fluency.
I had a friend who early in his translator career worked on a series of not very well written YA fantasy novels, and he kept getting into trouble with his editor for trying to improve the writing. He said that the hardest thing to learn was that if the sentence was badly written and confusing in the original it wasn't his place to fix, but to just translate it.
This article seems to adequate translation with adaptation, which is the crux of the issue I think.
In one case you might want to convey the exact words expressed regardless of the nuances, social context and "making it sound right". Your primary goal is to convey information, however clumsy it can feel as a result.
On the other case, you'll want the reader/listener to feel like a native person is talking to them, adapting to their reference frame, sacrificing accuracy to properly convey the spirit of the words.
I think it comes down to how much entertainment is expected from the result, if it's for research purpose for instance, accuracy will prime.
If, as I think is the main goal of the author, it's "to prevent that person in front of you from subjecting you to a sad, pitying look", fully adapting is surely the way to go.