Hearing Voices - Darian

 From the start of the reading, I really found the description from Professor Seidensticker that translation is a "series of dilemmas" to be an interesting way to view the various crossroads translators run into while translating. While it isn't necessarily true that translators are constantly choosing between "equally undesirable alternatives," there are multiple instances where the translator is forced to make a decision on how to portray an element of the original text, such as hearing an translating the writer's voice.

The section on voice was really interesting to me, as there were certain elements, such as the "orality" of the author in Uno's "A Wife's Letters," that really jump out to me once I see how the text was translated. Translating Tokushima dialect in another one of Uno's works also shows the challenges of capturing the nuances and quirks of a dialect in an original text while still conveying the voice, but Copeland mentions using people from her personal life as reference to capture the voice of the Tokushima dialect speaker.

Copeland also speaks on the influence of marketing and target audiences in the editing and presentation of the novel Grotesque. Not only was the English version of the novel shortened by 27 pages to make it more accessible to Western readers, but the Japanese marketers downplayed a lot of the elements that were more sensationalized by Western marketers, such as the sexuality and "human element" of the story.