C. Terry and L. Riggs Comments - Connie

Terry brings up an interesting topic that I want to touch upon, the piece he's translating from Yoshikawa Eiji's Miyamoto Musashi. He says that an English writer wouldn't write such an intensely detailed sentence so, from his perspective, he left out a lot of detail that was in the original because, from an English reader's pov, they probably wouldn't have bothered to read it. A good translation is usually accurate to the original but in some cases, things can be changed with the target audience's knowledge in mind like culture-related things that the original language's readers will know but not the target audience but I didn't think that choosing to fully omit details was a thing that happened even if you know "no one is going to read it". I'm not sure what my approach would be exactly but I don't think I would have thought of straying far from the original even if translating all the details would've made the translation sound uncouth, especially since the author isn't around anymore to consult with, I would probably stay a little bit more true to the original. I do like his mindset that he was trying to come up with what an English writer would have said in the same circumstances so that he could be more faithful to the original author's style instead of translating literally and having it be irksome and unenjoyable for the English audience.

Reading a scholarly essay in English is already hard itself but having to translate a Japanese essay, digest it, translate it into English, and rearrange it so that references and the context makes sense sounds like a huge buttload of work. The magazine translation was already difficult enough with some phrases I didn't quite understand but with a longer article/essay piece, there are many more phrases that depend on the original readers' knowledge and literary understanding that would need to be somehow reconstructed so that the target audience would also understand. I can't even imagine approaching an essay in hopes of being able to even slightly portray Japanese metaphors and such accurately in English as there could be a cultural gap between the languages.