Hearing Voices Response - Evan

    There were many ideas discussed in this text that I found interesting, but one point that struck me as particularly poignant was the idea that "translation is not performed in isolation." Copeland goes on to say that every translation is created from the mind of the translator-- a rather obvious fact, but when looked at closer, contains a lot of implications for each and every translated text one reads. It has been said that there is no such thing as a perfect translation. Somewhere along the line something- whether it be some minute nuance, some cultural significance, or some aspects of characterization- will be lost in translation. When Copeland says that "These [translations] carry with them, therefore, that person's individual experiences. His or her mood, moment, and memories all coalesce to color the particular choices made on any given day," it gives me a brief moment in which I feel almost panicked. I think of the hundreds of thousands of choices a translator must make in regard to any given text, and how within those hundreds of thousands of choices among hundreds of thousands of texts among hundreds of translators, how much has been lost for the monolingual audience? 

Aside from that, I found the fixation on individual words to be very relatable. I think for many people, particularly beginner translators as most of us are in this class, it can be exceedingly easy to fall into the trap of focusing far too much on a single word rather than the overall meaning and sentiment of the sentence. In this vein, Copeland speaks to translating the "power" each word holds. I found it very interesting! Reading on so many perspectives that are somehow both differing and similar has really widened my perception of the field of translation.