I think a common point both these articles made was that translating between Japanese and English often requires a vast amount of re-writing, particularly for expository writing.
Terry definitely made his point clear, that a good translation is almost certainly not a truly faithful one. Japanese and English are simply too structurally and culturally separated to be able to easily substitute the exact sentiment from one language into the other in the same manner, as he outlined with his various translation tips. Of these, I was most interested in his focus on how readers skim and skip around writing, and so it's important to keep the pace of your writing moving along and also compelling enough for your reader to continue. I liked his practical, real-world approach here. If nobody wants to read what you wrote, what's the point in translating it? I think he made a good suggestion in regards to this: provide the cultural context an English-speaking reader would need in the right amount -- enough that they can slow down and examine it closely if it matters to them, but strategically delivered so that they can skim or skip it if they choose, therefore keeping them engaged but still serving the readers who care to be more informed.
The way that Riggs described translating Japanese explanatory writing into English, detailing how tedious of a process it is because you essentially have to rearrange the entire text into the traditionally accepted English format, made me wonder what the reverse of that process (English into Japanese) would look like. Would it operate exactly opposite to the method Riggs mentioned, where you essentially deconstruct the English structure and rearrange it to match the comparatively repetitive and abstract argumentative orthodoxy of Japanese? You would think that expository writing would be easier to directly translate than literature, but this compositional issue made me change my mind.
Sloane
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