Murakami Readings 9/15 Kohki

I never read a book with different translations and compared them, so it was a new concept to me that there are important differences between different translations. Lesser mentioned feeling a barrier when reading a book written by an author whom she’s used to reading but translated by a different translator. I never really paid attention to the translator when buying a translated book, since I thought it wouldn’t make that much of a difference. However, when I read the examples from Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was surprised by how different the two translations are.

It was mentioned in one of the articles that Murakami himself is a translator too, and that it was helpful for the translators. It made me wonder if the opposite is true, so if translators are writers as well, would the translated text be better than one that was translated by a non-writer translator? When translating a novel, it’s not just converting from one language to another, but writing another novel at the same time. Writers will know the workflow of writing a novel and the struggles of it too, so I guess writers would do better than non-writers.

Also, when a translator revises a translated work, it seems impossible to perceive it completely separately from the original text, which would make it difficult to objectively assess the translated text as a novel. Especially when working on a long novel like 1Q84 with another translator, I thought it would be hard to keep the consistency and revise/assess the translated novel as a whole.