Carpenter Comments - Dawson

     Just a few pages in and Carpenter's experiences are immensely relatable.  I as well got interested in translation after I started learning Japanese and came across sentences that were very alien to English and seemed very hard to translate.  The limitless void of words that you don't know as well is very relatable.  Onomatopoeia being horrible to translate as well is extremely relatable.  I don't love the "Rarin' to go" translation of もりもり、 even given the context, but this was written in 2009, and I do think it actually works really well for that time period.  Just not for the modern day.  I think the point about the original text needing to be followed more closely since it was a bilingual book was interesting.  That is something I hadn't really thought of before.  I suppose in general, it basically goes - the more constrictions you have, the worse your translation is going to end up being, on average.  This makes sense intuitively.  It also explains why anime subtitles are often much more subpar than novel translations!  They have to match the mouth movement.  And for a bilingual book, they have to clearly be expressing the same idea in similar words, since readers might understand both languages, and the editors probably care more about the similarity.  But for a novel, they have a lot more discretion, and can play with the words as much as they want to capture the same feeling, more than meaning.  

"Even if you get a different feeling for the music yourself, you’re stuck with the feelings that the author had or that Mozart had. That’s the nature of translation." - This feels quite pertinent as well.  The translator is merely a middleman between the author and the reader.  What matters is not the translator's feelings in the middle, but that the feeling is conveyed from the author to the reader.  And you have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of everyone at once, like Carpenter says, in order to ensure that feeling gets across.  It seems like such a balancing act, though.  To manage to convey the full feeling and rhythm of the original text whilst not changing anything too significantly seems very difficult.  If you are an official translator, you'll end up getting some critic writing an entire book attacking you for not translating it exactly word for word regardless of how it sounds in English, apparently, like that Murakami translation criticism book.  Carpenter seems like a really good translator in general, is one of my takeaways.  Every one of the translations she brigns up as an example is really quite clever.