Translating is often more than mechanically trying to convey the rough meaning.  You want to capture the rhythm and flow and poetry (or lack of) in the original.  You want to try to map idioms an word play from one language to another, and so and so forth.  This requires a near-native level of understanding of the language you are translating to<p>I have a friend who is a translator and one of the hardest things for him in the beginning was not to act as a editor.  If the original has a long, badly structured sentence with a misplaced comma, then you have to try to translate that into a long, badly structured sentence with a misplaced comma.