I found this whole post really interesting, but especially the part about translations as transformative works, and how audience affects translation choices --
a "good" translation – loosely defined as "communicates the original work with sufficient fidelity" – is in many ways a lot like writing fic because you always write to an audience even if you don't write for one
I can only speak from very minimal and amateur experience on this topic, but this all makes a lot of sense to me. There are so many choices you have to make about how to interpret the original before you can try to convey the "same" meaning (and feeling!) faithfully in another language, and yeah, a lot of that will rely on assumptions you have to make about the target audience of the translation itself, and what level/kind of fidelity to the original they want or are expecting. I've never thought about that being like fanfic before, but it really kind of is. And fanfic as a whole phenomenon certainly highlights how wide a range of readings/interpretations there can be for the same source material...
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Date: 2022-02-08 02:32 pm (UTC)a "good" translation – loosely defined as "communicates the original work with sufficient fidelity" – is in many ways a lot like writing fic because you always write to an audience even if you don't write for one
I can only speak from very minimal and amateur experience on this topic, but this all makes a lot of sense to me. There are so many choices you have to make about how to interpret the original before you can try to convey the "same" meaning (and feeling!) faithfully in another language, and yeah, a lot of that will rely on assumptions you have to make about the target audience of the translation itself, and what level/kind of fidelity to the original they want or are expecting. I've never thought about that being like fanfic before, but it really kind of is. And fanfic as a whole phenomenon certainly highlights how wide a range of readings/interpretations there can be for the same source material...