Quote:
Originally Posted by Kudryavka
Its not about skill of the translators, unfortunately. No matter how good, a translator is rewriting the authors work into something of their own. The more it gets rewritten, the farther it gets from the authors original vision (unless the author is in contact with translator, which is never the case in fansubs). I suppose a terible C translator coould put out a bad translation, but if B has no knoowledge of language J, how are they supossed to respect the original authors vision at all? They cant, they can only guess what the author meant through A's work.
And yea for some languages its either multi-regurgitated translations or none at all.
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I would argue that it depends, especially when it comes to academic translations. Academic translations usually come with extensive footnotes and detailed forewords that explain the intricacies of the translation and relevant quirks of the source language.
The author's intent is a matter of interpretation as well; maybe A and B were really on the same page as the author and C completely missed the point. There's no reason to say B would have to "guess" what the author meant. Far from it, B has A's translation to work from. If my friend read a book and told me what the book was about, would I be "guessing" about the content of the book? If my friend had good critical reading skills and good explanation skills, I'd probably end up with a pretty good idea of what the book was about.
What's more, there are some who would argue that the intent of the author is irrelevant to the integrity of the text. What makes a "good" translation in the first place isn't all that clear-cut.
Just playing devil's advocate here. Of course, a good direct translation with no intermediary languages is preferred in the vast majority of cases.