AW: Breaking barriers

[Fuqiao Xue]

2021年10月24日(日) 14:03 Asmus Freytag via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>:
> (**) someone mentioned that human translators don't always agree on the best translations. And, sometimes authors who are not bilingual feel emboldened to insist on a more "literal" translation, because to their limited understanding of the target language, a more natural phrasing may sound unusual and there for different from what they think it should have been. Therefore, what constitutes an "accurate" translation is very much a moving target.

Indeed. Faithfulness to the source text is the most important
principle of translation, but different translators have different
understanding and practices of this principle. If the original text is
with a lyrical style, then in the translation process, the translator
should also choose those beautiful and emotional words to express the
original author's emotions. If the style of the original text is
plain, then the translator should use plain words when translating.

Translation can be considered as constantly asking such a question: if
the original author is a great, for example, writer in the English
language, how would he/she write this book in English? Translation
should be based on concepts rather than sentences/phrases/words (even
words/phrases with the same meaning in different languages might be
used in different contexts, and sometimes there is no word
corresponding to the word in the original text), and every concept
that has appeared in the original text should be clearly reflected in
the translation.