Terry and Riggs Comments - Kadin

 As I had mentioned in my post last week, I find it interesting that all of our readings included an analogy of translation. The one this week seems to take it a bit too far. 'If they are faithful, they are not beautiful; if they are beautiful, they are not faithful. It might be added that translations, like women, must avoid sounding ridiculous if they are to succeed.' from A Live Dog. Though I do agree that a piece of translated work tends to fall within a spectrum between both ends of faithfulness and beauty, I think that it is wrong to dictate them as an absolute to either extent. A good translator requires imagination and cunning to merge both in order for the text itself to be interesting, otherwise it would be too drab or overly exaggerated.

After reading Rigg's In Interlingual Hell, I'm glad that she describes the process needed to produce a first draft. I like how she pointed out the two main ways: Either to simply go in without preparation and tackle one sentence at a time, or to read through and prepare yourself for parts that you anticipate would find challenging to interpret. She points out that going straight in usually leads to smoother sentences in exchange for an inability to keep logic on course. I find that during our translations, I much prefer reminding myself of the context of the text so that each sentence ties into an overarching theme or goal, I would argue that the smoothness of a sentence can be later modified into something else that also works. As a first draft, I don't think the smoothness of a sentence is the larger issue at hand. As such I usually go with the latter option of preparing the text beforehand.