Eight Ways to Say You

I enjoyed the way the article described translation as "a balancing act, requiring sensitivity and intuition, a combination of humility, vigilance, and arrogance. I say humility because as a translator I must be willing to accept that the author comes first, and that even if I don’t agree, or think that I can say it better, the author is always right." This encompasses much of what we have discussed in class, the line between translating and rewriting an authors work. The line can be difficult to walk, as the concepts often need to be tweaked slightly when translating media into a new language in order to match the feelings of the new to those of the original. This is especially important to consider when translating any sort of jokes or figurative speech from the original language to the target language, as humor takes on very different shapes across language and culture.

The article also urges translators to find a balance between "arrogance and humility [which] may appear to be contradictory, but [you] need a certain amount of arrogance to believe that [you] have the ability to become the author in another language." If you do not have faith in your own skills as a translator, you will likely do poorly, but the same can be said for anyone who may posses too much. Too much self indulgence will change the overall feeling of the story, and it will not do the original or the author any justice.

- Danielle