What makes a translation great?
I'm quite proficient in German and English, but still translating is astonishing hard, even into my mother tongue Spanish. The translation always sounds weird. I'm always in awe at great translations.
When I read translated texts (or watch dubbed films) I always catch false friends or awkward translations, and I "see" the original through the translation like it was a leaky abstraction. It's so tricky even the pros make a lot of mistakes.
I feel that I am very sensitive to "translations sounding like translations". A feeling of "that isn't quite how a native person would say that, but I can't really identify what's wrong". My mother tongue is Dutch, and the strange thing is that with the strong influence of the English language, even a lot of content written in Dutch today sounds like it was translated from English. I find it really hard to explain it clearly though. Does anyone else feel the same and maybe knows what causes it?
To me a great translation should have Translator Notes (TN) and not be afraid of using neologisms. It seems TNs used to be more common but are increasingly rare.
English-only speaker here.
A good translation is one where the "good" in the original comes through. That might be a concept, a story, or even the rhythm of the words. Great books especially have _many_ good things that a translation needs to handle. Translation is hard because sometimes translating a "feel" might come at a loss of the clarity needed to express an idea.
I like what Emerson said about it in "Books"
> What is really best in any book is translatable, – any real insight or broad human sentiment. Nay, I observe that, in our Bible, and other books of lofty moral tone, it seems easy and inevitable to render the rhythm and music of the original into phrases of equal melody.
To answer what is a great translation, we first need to ask to whom it should be great.
The readers? The only thing that makes a translation great for them is whether the translated text reads well. Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care, that's why they are reading a translation!
The publishers or whoever hired the translator(s)? The most important thing for them is speed of translation, how many words per minute. Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.
The translators themselves? Depending on whether these are amateurs translating out of passion or professionals translating for a living, what makes a translation great is going to be either accuracy or speed (time is money!) respectively.
Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality, and if you're translating for someone for hire there are usually more pressing concerns over quality.[1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...
>A good translation wants to be read
So much this. For example I think a lot of people would actually enjoy Iliad and Odyssey more if their first experience weren't in dactylic hexameter.
My two Jabberwocky translations:
I enjoyed Hofstadter's _Le ton beau de Marot_, which is precisely about this question; it studies many people's different translations of one particular obscure poem, and asks what properties of the original should be preserved.
Written language is like the outer skin layer, a product of a living organism consisting of dead cells. Being a good translator is to have a good sense of what those organisms are.
I'm always so torn about reading translations, especially of poetry. I do read them and value them but I always wonder what was lost in doing so.
I have a bit of a sense of this having learned a couple of languages enough to be aware of what's lost in translation, and examples of good and bad translations.
Michael Kandel's translation to English of Stanisław Lem's original Polish:
https://mwichary.medium.com/seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-725...
Only a truly great translator can fundamentally alter the meaning of the source and get away with it. (Well played, Ted Woolsey.)
Hofstadter wrote a whole book on it - "Le ton beau de Marot"
The objective of a translator should be to retain the spirit of the original, and have the translated piece stand on its own two feet as a work of literature. This is why Ezra Pound and Christopher Logue were such good translators.
Pound translated into English the Analects of Confucius, a bunch of Noh Plays, and many other works of Chinese and Japanese literature. But he was barely capable of reading Chinese or Japanese at all. He was provided with rough word-for-word translations by friends like Ernest Fenollosa, and he translated those into literature.
Logue didn't know any Ancient Greek, but his rendition of a part of the Iliad is probably the greatest achievement of late 20th century poetry. He simply re-worked the (many) existing English translations into something more lyrical and contemporary. In effect, he reinterpreted the existing body of translations -- and, in his own way, heightened their effect, and captured much of the spirit of the original.
I find that most translations -- especially of poetry -- tend to be altogether too mechanical. Pound and Logue had it figured out.