While reading these articles, I was reminded of my time in manga fan-translation. As Terry stresses throughout his piece, the literal words of any given original text matter far less than the meaning and intention they convey, which Riggs says is a "laborious and painful...process of expository transmigration" that is often too much for a translator to handle and often falls to editors or rewriters to complete. In my circle, at least, the process was exactly so: the translator would provide a line-for-line manuscript of all text from the chapter, and it very often fell to the typesetters and quality assurers to make sure the translated chapter actually sounded English and appealed to English readers.
Terry's commentary on the many extraneous grammatical constructions of Japanese was also something that I hadn't considered before. Lots of repetition, restating, or circular writing that supposedly add to a Japanese reader's experience of the text is completely unnecessary or even burdensome to an English reader. To this end, he suggests that when grappling with word-for-word translation versus an "unfaithful but good English" translation, one should keep in mind what a Japanese reader goes through. The example given is that a Japanese reader would also skip over those extraneous phrases, but the difference is that they know to skip them, while an English reader does not.
Rigg's piece gives me the impression that translating non-fiction is indeed way more difficult than fiction translation, as the latter often does follow a certain structure that can be relied on. I was a little surprised at the recommendation that one would often completely turn the original text over its head, essentially rewriting the entire thing based on the ideas it puts forth, rather than just carrying the words over to another language. After all, if you drag something through Hell, does it really come out the same?
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