1, C. Hirano, “Eight Ways to Say You”

 I really respect Mrs. Hirano. The way she speaks about translation in high regard, to her desire to connect people of different cultures via translation, her personality embodies the fine balance of dedication, care, humility, and awareness needed for a translator.

I love that she always assumes there may be another way to translate a work. In many of the other readings, I sometimes felt like the translator believed they had "figured it out" for translation. Like they knew they needed this or that to do the original work justice. While they may have been right, I feel like the crux of translation is set the moment a translator thinks they've figured it out, because--in reality, that is never the case.

It feels like when you are asking ChatGPT help on a homework question, and you can obviously tell that the AI is off, but Chat still answers as if it knows it's right.

In any case, I fully-heartedly believe her message that a great translation makes the reader laugh, cry, pause, and experience the same emotions at the same time no matter the language is the true essence of translation (at least in works where thats their goal).

One of the hardest challenges I find, is determining how to translate scenarios where the emotion stems from cultural context, like a memory of a child's time at "juku", or the comedic image of a round smooth japanese figure. You can make the reader feel the same emotion theoretically if you spin the context around the set language's own cultural context, like talking about afterschool memories or another person like the "The Rock", but at what cost? You are somewhat forced to sacrifice cultural context for emotion or vice versa.