9/21 Reading Comments

I thought the readings this week were quite useful in providing more insight on whether there is ever only one objectively correct way to translate an original work, and perhaps compromises or even slight alterations to the original meaning should be allowed. The text by Hirano, the part where she talks about the compromise of replacing Tokugawa Ieyasu with Buddha, I found to be particularly interesting. Translators have to take into consideration the significance of culturally or historically infused objects, phrases, etc. If no satisfactory direct translation is producible, the translator must supplement the expression with another of a more neutral background, all whilst maintaining the integrity of the original work.

This also relates to Seidensticker's reply to one of the Q&A questions that I found to be quite interesting. Although some translators believe that texts should be faithfully translated sentence by sentence, "and when you come to a period in the original, you come to a period in a translation", Seidensticker believes that transposition of entire sentences within a paragraph, as long as the result is satisfactory, should be permitted. Although I'm not sure if there has been any opportunity to do so in the past 2 texts that we've had to translate, so far I've done the translations sentence by sentence. It might be helpful to keep in mind that this method is an available tool if the text appears to be too difficult to translate while also preserving the meaning of the text, and maintaining a proper rhythm as described by Seidensticker.