On Translation
Not exactly sure why this is a Hacker News thing but...<p>I wholeheartedly disagree with: &quot;I would argue that the translator serves the author and the original text. Period.&quot;  I think it should be pretty obvious that a translator servers primarily their readers, specifically non-native speakers who want to read a work without learning a new language.<p>Which then creates the problem of what do you leave out in a translation?  Because you can go nuts trying to keep every syntactic nuance, but then you lose the forest for the trees - the text has no flow for the reader, it becomes hard work where it wasn&#x27;t originally and the overall experience is flawed.  Or you can be faithful to the broad strokes of the work, the essence of it, while changing many of the finer details to achieve it.  I think both methods can serve a purpose, but they need to do so clearly and consistently.<p>It&#x27;s a little like trying to draw a 3D object in 2D - you can only show a slice at a time and no matter what you do, you are forced to make serious omissions.  So a translator should do this mindfully.  Discounting other approaches feels a little smarmy and pointless.