Many of the points made in this reading were what I confronted when I was translating 「コロッケ」. Before, I had never translated literature at all between English and Japanese since I'd only translated school letters and news for my parents, which don't really require preserving the nuances or subtle details, but it's just translating word by word. I agree with Hirano's argument that "I must strive to remain true not only to the essence, but also to the style and tone of the writer in the source language while at the same time render it in a way that is understandable to someone from a very different culture and way of thinking". When translating literature, I find it difficult to preserve really subtle yet important nuances and characters' personalities, and if I want to do that, it would need a description and also there would be many "correct" versions of translation. And that's why I agree with Hirano's view that it's important to know the purpose and intended audience of translation. Then, it's possible to know the general direction as to how the original text is translated.
In my opinion, it's impossible to not miss any information in the original text because cultural and linguistic differences are just too large. As Hirano mentioned there are numerous ways to say 'you', as well as 'I' in Japanese, and each one of them has a subtle nuance to it. Also, calling a character by its first name or last name changes the implied relationship between those characters too. But I think it's possible to convey most of the original meaning by providing contextual information and choosing words and sentence structures flexibly.
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