9/21 What does it mean to be faithful to the original

This week’s reading led me to think about what does it really mean to be faithful to the original?

Through the workshops over the past few weeks, I have come to realize that translation rarely involves finding a one-to-one equivalent between words. The intended audience inevitably shapes what a translation becomes. This is why translation is not simply a transfer between languages, but a form of cultural mediation.

Yet this realization also brings me to the dilemma that Hirano herself raises. If we remain too faithful to the original, the target reader may not understand it; but if we change too much, translation begins to become rewriting. However，the example in The Friends, where "Tokugawa Ieyasu" is replaced by "Buddha", suddenly made this tension clear to me. It is obviously not a literal translation. But if "Tokugawa Ieyasu" were kept, an American child might have no idea why the entire class was laughing. In that moment, I began to see that faithfulness in literary translation may be closer to preserving the author’s intended experience.

A good translation, then, is not necessarily the one that looks most like the original. Perhaps the similarity between two versions does not lie in the text itself, but in the experience it creates—the ability to recreate, for a reader from another culture, something close to what the original reader felt. That includes cultural assumptions, tone, humor, relationships, and emotions.

The ending of the article stayed with me the most. The author’s son experienced the beauty of Japanese literature through an English recorded book. The medium had changed, the language had changed, and even some of the details had changed. We may never know whether every change was exactly “right”. But what matters is that, somehow, the story still found its way to “reach” another person.

Mingzi