apieceofmine replied to your post: Who here loves Jules Verne? I do! I do!Interesting, I always...

apieceofmine replied to your post: Who here loves Jules Verne? I do! I do!

Interesting, I always assumed that 'translation' was pretty darn straightforward. But I never really thought much about it. Welp! Now I am!

Yep, translation is an art, not a science. Simply translating something literally word for word into English would make it virtually unreadable. I have a book of Japanese haikus that have been translated into English. Amazingly, they retain the haiku form even though they were originally written in Japanese. I keep this around for comic relief, too. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is a pretty hard book to translate, too, because much of it was written in a style of mocking (of German Lutheranism). We can never get this in English. Humor, punning, satire, etc., are virtually impossible to translate.