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Years ago, in college, I tried my hand at translating a poem from German.
It was actually kind of fun. I translated it directly into English, and completely ruined the flow and feeling of the poem. This beautiful poem became awkward and forced. So I decided to rework the poem to keep the imagery and overall meaning but chose words that flowed better and fit the structure of the poem. Basically, I translated it twice. Once from German to English, and once from English into pretty English.
I gained huge respect for good translations after that exercise.
Reminds me of another story.
We had a patent case go to trial, and the original documents were in Japanese so both parties had translators in the court room. We were trying to show that the inventors made this amazing discovery, and the other team was trying to say the discovery was nothing special. The original Japanese documents described the discovery with a Japanese word that meant "better than" or "superior" or something like that. The judge stopped the witness testimony at one point when he realized the importance of the translation of this one word and he asked each translator to explain the meaning of the word. They were throwing different English words out and the lawyers on each side were kind of coaching them to come up with meanings that helped their side. Our translator explained that the Japanese word is a word of motion and that it evokes jumping or leaping and so she offered up "leaps and bounds better" as a translation. The other teams' translator got so excited about this translation, because it captured the feeling of the word, that she readily agreed that this was the correct meaning before looking to her team's attorneys for their approval. They were not pleased. "leaps and bounds better" is not a phrase you want to have recognized by the court as the correct translation when you are trying to downplay the importance of a discovery.
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