Words carry more than just their meaning. They also possess an aesthetic quality that can derive from their meaning, their sound when being pronounced, or even the appearance of the word if it contains symmetry. While these are purely subjective and personal preferences, translators can find themselves faced with the task of trying to decipher and properly transfer that aesthetic quality into another language. As if this alone wasn’t tricky enough, it must also be balanced with the accurate translation of meaning and sense.
Literary translations, by their very nature, offer plenty of opportunities for a translator to use his or her personal judgement when deciding how to translate a text. Indeed, if machine translators ever reach the level of accuracy that a human translator can possess, literary translations may be the final frontier where machines cannot compete. Only a true and complete understanding of techniques being used, such as implied references, understatement, irony, parallelism, rhyme and rhythm in all their manifestations, etc. can produce a correct translation of a particular literary text. The degree of subjectivity in literary texts, and the interpretation that it requires, means that a machine or less-than-apt translator could hardly do justice to the original when translating the meaning into another language. The degree of subjectivity in literary texts, and the interpretation that it requires, means that a machine or less-than-apt translator could hardly do justice to the original when translating the meaning into another language.
Yet when translating a work of poetry or prose, for example, the translator must be sure to remove his or her self and personal expression from their understanding of the text. They must interpret the work on the level intended by the author. It requires walking a thin line of interpretation without interference, with a balancing pole that carries stated meaning and accuracy on one end, implied sense and aesthetics on the other. When done correctly, translating literature of any kind is the ultimate balancing act.
