Eight Ways to Say You Thoughts Dawson

The first main takeaway I had from the reading was the reiteration of the point that the most important thing in translation is the feel behind the words, far more than the direct meanings of the words.  Since words that are technically the same have vastly different "feel" behind them across languages, the best one can do while translating is to choose what matches those feelings, rather than what matches the exact meaning the best.  Since all words in general are simply the personification of feelings and vague ideas, this will end up translating the text more accurately in the end as well, as the true nature of the idea behind the text lies in the feelings, not in the words.  I really like the "you presume indeed" translation the author did, as it took something completely irrepresentable in English and still managed to represent it as closely as possible by completely changing the words to match the feeling. 

The second main point I gathered was on the importance of culture in portraying the feeling properly.  This seems like it might be one of the most difficult aspects of translation.  Matching cultural context seems a lot more complex than matching even very difficult words, phrases and flow.  Sometimes, there is far less of a cultural equivalent to translate to then there would be for any regular words or concepts.  I really like the way the author of this piece did it, by adding a paragraph of explanation behind something that just saying "cram school" wouldn't portray at all to people who have no strong cultural perception of it.  It all just goes back to portraying the feelings behind the words you get when you read them in one language versus the other.  Part of the difficulty behind this, especially for certain cultural concepts or even words, is that unless you yourself have been fully immersed in that culture or had a lot of exposure to that word, you might be very prone to missing some of that critical feel behind it and end up mistranslating it or losing a portion of that intended feeling.  I suppose this makes large degrees of exposure to the language and culture in many ways the most important thing to successful and accurate translation.