Terry and Riggs Response - Elliot

 Well, the chauvinistic anology Prof. Zielinska-Elliott mentiodned certainly caught me off guard. Ignoring the crudeness of the analogy, I also think it's an exaggeration. While there are certain parts of Japanese that can't be translated both faithfully and elegantly, I don't think they're everpresent, which I assume means my definition of a "faithful" translation differs from whoever came up with that analogy. Similarly, I don't think the problems in the following section are an especially tricky part of translation, unless you have a very rigid definition of faithfulness. Most of the phrases mentioned are just fluff that happen to be more common in Japanese prose than English, and aren't integral to the meaning of the writing. Like Terry says himself, they usually should simply be ommitted, and I think restructuring translated prose into natural English is probably the most benign and ubiquitous way a work is modified through translation. On the other hand, I certainly empathize with Terry for the next section, regarding how Japanese people simply say different things than English speakers would in the same situation. There's no universal approach to these problems, and they have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Sometimes the meaning carried by a certain phrase is worth the incongruity it creates in English. That said, I'm not in favor of leaving いただきます, よろしくお願します, お疲れ様 and the like untranslated. As the reading progresses, I realize Terry shares my sentiment about literal translation. A (very cynical) amateur fan translator acquaintance of mine once said that with translation, "the consumers don't actually know what they want." Obviously, you have to retain the ideas of the original text, but people simply won't enjoy a translation that isn't well-written in English, and that's the only indicator of translation quality the average Joe can analyze.

This second reading makes me doubt my work on the article translation a little. I struggled with some portions, but it certainly didn't feel like hell. It also had something of an opening paragraph, although it was more an introduction of Hideshima Fumika than a thesis statement. I did feel like the article didn't really have a clear progression of ideas like I see in English, though. This reading also gives me the sense that article translation focuses more heavily on making natural English writing, as opposed to, say, literary translation, where preserving the author's voice is more valued.