Murakami Articles - Dawson

 Reading these articles brought me to recognize something that I had never really thought about before: it is impossible to completely accurately translate something.  Which is something that is obvious in retrospect, but never something I had consciously thought deeply about before.  No matter how skilled the translator, two translations of the same emotionally complex text will inevitably differ.  Not only because the words themselves have different meaning that doesn't translate one to one to the target language, but also because even for native speakers, every person will likely end up with their own interpretation of the text.  Every person's mental model of words and what emotions they carry will all differ, and thus every reader and every translator will have a different interpretation of the text at hand.  

This invariably results in translated works containing to at least some degree the soul of the translator in them on top of that of the author.  Even the 'perfect' translator (which by itself is a contradiction, since there can be no perfection in translation) will leave behind small traces of themselves.  The best they can do is interpret the feel of the language to word choices and sentence structures in their native language that will give them a similar feeling.  

The Wendy Lesser article is especially interesting, as it brings up the idea that the voice of the translator can have a significant positive effect on the readers' (or at least a portion of the readers, as everything is subjective) experience.  Lesser vastly preferred Birnbaum's translations, due to his unique voice that he put into the text.  However, is the fact that he put any of his voice at all into the text a bad thing, since it overshadows, to some degree, the author's voice?  He may be adding, at least somewhat, emotion that wasn't fully there in the original text.  Is that not changing the author's original intent?  I honestly am not sure myself whether that is bad or good.  I think it should be the author's choice whether that is okay or not.  Due to that, I agree with Philip Gabriel in that a translation can almost never improve the original text. But it does beg the question.  What *should* proper translation look like?  In general, how much liberty *should* you take in making a more natural, enjoyable experience in English whilst still maintaining the original intent/feeling?