Something I really liked was Hirano's description of how she translated The Friends and how this connects to her point of the difficulties in translating culture along with words. Already with the title we see the nuances between Japanese and English: In Japanese,「夏の庭」, a very abstract, picture-like title acting as a soft backdrop for the story; In English, "The Friends" -- a straightforward title describing the protagonists. This difference also exemplifies Hirano's previous point of Japanese being more subtle and evocative, whereas English is more explicit and stresses clarity, and the differences and complications this may create in translation.
Hirano continues with an extended discussion of the term juku. "Cram school" is the "correct" English translation word-wise, but this translation loses whole culture of the Japanese education system and the stress it brings on students; an American reader reading this, for example, might think it's something these characters only go on the weekends, or just 1-2 hours after school and they can still make it home for dinner. It was then interesting to see Hirano consulting both the original author and the editor to discuss how to translate this part, both because I always assumed that translation was more or less a one-person job without these extended discussions, and because how one word -- juku -- in Japanese resulted in a whole paragraph of translation to explain what juku was to an English reader.
This also reminded me of a (arguably much-more famous) example of culture lost in translation: the Japanese saying「３人寄れば文殊の知恵」. It is easy to translate this to English: "two heads are better than one". However, 文殊 -- the bodhisattva of knowledge -- gets lost in this translation, therefore the nuance of "how much better" is not completely transferred over. In English, "2 > 1" -- almost like a primary school math problem; In Japanese, 3 "commoners" can surpass the "god of knowledge" -- a huge gap able to be covered by adding two people.
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