Hearing Voices - Lane

 I often hear the perspective that reading a translation should be an equivalent experience to reading the original in its original language and cultural context, especially in discussions of domestication. I do agree with this perspective to an extent--I think that being overly faithful can actually wind up being unfaithful sometimes--but hearing about Copeland's experience with her publisher has made me examine this perspective.

In hearing voices and translating them onto the page, we are, in part, domesticating and creating an equivalent experience; we translate the voices we have heard rather than faithfully adhering to every single word on the page. Still, in discussing her translation of Kirino's Grotesque, Copeland notes how part of this process of domestication was streamlining and cutting parts of the text, as "Knopf was charged with making the English Grotesque as familiar to its audiences as Gurotesuku was to Kirino’s." While the text may now be an equivalent experience to an American reader, the cuts that were made do call to mind another meaning of the word "domestication"--taming. The Japanese nature of the text has been tamed in favor of an English audience--I am not sure how to feel about this, in all honesty. Is there such a thing as going too far in localization/domestication?