I found the beginning section of Copeland's text somewhat heartwarming (微笑ましい？かな？) and nostalgic when she elaborated on her first major translation under Seidensticker for Shiga Naoya. I remember a little earlier in the semester feeling like I had to translate every word and struggled somewhat with words that were difficult to translate (like oseibō). I think I especially felt that way when it comes to novels, short stories and other more artistic texts since writers don't pick words willy nilly and I felt like I should respect things like word choice (which is still how I feel though to not as strong an extent). I think translating more official texts helped since those focus on readability and I also felt like those were more fun.
Like we discussed in class dialect is difficult to translate, especially since it's often used in a much deeper sense than just "this person comes from here." I still don't know how we would translate dialect, aside from using a maybe Southern dialect/accent or a British tone or something since Southern accents have their own implications, as do British accents. When running into accent/dialect problems, I can't help, but wish we were translating to Chinese since there are similar dialect differences there (if I'm recalling correctly from my rudimentary Mandarin classes in high school). I hope we can continue the discussion on translating dialects sometime in the future, especially in the context of lesser known dialects like Aomori/Akita dialect or Okinawa dialect (both of which are really difficult to understand).
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