"After all, you're not trying to explain the original, but recreate it so that it works in all the same gut levels." -- Jay Rubin. I think this quote well summarizes my key takeaways from the four articles. Japanese and English are two very different languages, both in syntax, grammar, and cultural aspects behind the languages. Found in Translation mentions how Japanese sentence structure is SOV -- different from the English SVO, which makes it hard to translate sentences where the verb is the "punchline". The Atlantic article also talks about how the suffixes to a name in Japanese: -san, -kun, -chan, etc., can convey different meanings of intimacy between the speakers, whereas in English the best we have is perhaps Mr. / Ms. and calling by first / last name. In addition, I noticed from reading translated VS. Japanese original manga that the way characters may end their sentences in unique ways (i.e. すごいにゃん for a cat-themed character) can be really hard to translate, and often feels unnatural when they are translated (i.e. that's so cool-nya).
I think these are all choices that translators must make while translating the works. It is certainly easy to put annotations in the translation -- footnotes / translator's notes, if you will, but this will also break the flow of the story and read -- as Rubin puts it -- more like an explanation of the original text. Ignoring these small but special features would also not be commendable, as Wendy Lesser writes, a translator should "translate the author's voice", of which these narration techniques are integral to. In Found in Translation, the description of Phillip Gabriel creating the paws vs. pause pun to substitute for Murakami's original Japanese pun of liking a cat to lend a hand was especially interesting to me, as I think it is a great example of combining being truthful to the original while preserving the flow and legibility of the story. However, I also expect that finding such equivalent puns isn't possible in every situation, and I wonder what should happen when a translator encounters an "untranslatable" joke.
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