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I feel like a lot of people implicitly believe that a text only has one correct interpretation, and that this interpretation will be obvious to a native speaker of the language it's written in unless the writer is bad at expressing themselves clearly
but as the literal mountains of commentary that exist on pretty much all well-known works of literature and philosophy indicate, this is not in fact true
this implicit belief also leads people to believe that translation is simply a process whereby words are converted into equivalent words in other languages and reordered/reinflected depending on the grammar of the new language
translation therefore winds up envisioned as a fairly mechanical process, and you could, in theory, replace translators with a long list of rules about how to convert words/phrases/sentences from one language to another
(think Searle's Chinese room, for those of you familiar with that. the fact that chinese is used in the example is especially funny, since chinese sentences usually require a lot of context to disambiguate, unlike English which requires you to be relatively explicit)
but this isn't a good picture of translation. translation requires interpretation, and as mentioned above, even highly competent speakers of a language may disagree on how to interpret a particular text, down to the sentence/phrase level
typically, even *if* a translator notices that the text admits of multiple interpretations, it will be very difficult to preserve that ambiguity in the translated text. for one thing, as in the Chinese->English case, the grammar of one language may force you to be explicit
where the original language is ambiguous. often times, the confluence of meanings that generate the ambiguity just doesn't exist in the second language, because, for instance, there isn't a homophone with the same pair of meanings
or the second language divides up the semantic space differently (eg. 管 can be hard to translate into English because it encompasses a range of behavior that would be distinguished by english vocabulary)
another somewhat amusing example is the case of the year of the goat/sheep in the Chinese zodiac, where there was a great deal of confusion about whether it was in fact the year of the goat or the year of sheep among English speakers
because the Chinese word 羊 encompasses both. But English forces you to choose, unless you want to go with something awkward like "Caprini" which does cover both but is a technical term not used in colloquial english
In the case of literature, how you translate dialogue necessarily draws on your interpretation of the character who is saying it, because you have to make choices about *how* they say it
Even in cases where you might think things are relatively cut and dry, such as policy papers, how a translator *interprets* the text will necessarily affect how they translate it. One particularly striking case I came across
(It's a bit politically sensitive, but that's perhaps why it's so striking) is when there was some reporting about accusations of forced sterilizations of Uighur women in Xinjiang and claims that China was deliberately trying
to reduce the population of Uighurs via various birth control methods, I went and looked at some of the Chinese policy papers that were cited. In them, I found that there was indeed a policy of 宣传-ing (lol, horrible chinglish) information about birth control and encouraging
increased use of birth control in Xinjiang. Why did I leave 宣传 in Chinese? well, because this is where a translator's viewpoint comes in. You could translate this word a couple of ways that will come across as radically different
in English, despite the word being the same in Chinese. You could go with the anodyne "publicized" ie. the govt will make greater efforts to "publicize information about and benefits of birth control." This makes the policy sound relatively harmless
After all, many people agree that increased knowledge of and access to birth control is a good thing. On the other hand, 宣传 can also be translated as "propaganda" ie. the govt will make greater efforts to "create propaganda about the benefits of birthh control"
not so harmless sounding now. Whether a given translator chooses one or the other will depend a great deal on how they interpret the birth control policy overall, their views on the Chinese government, their views on whether translations should make an effort
to sound politically neutral, what constitutes politically neutral, a whole host of things. This may not even be a conscious choice--the sentence may *already* read a certain way to them depending on prior assumptions.
To bring things back to my original point, there is simply no removing the interpretive aspect of translation or the translator's own viewpoint from the translation. There is no translation from nowhere.
Even if something is translated mechanically, though there may be no intentional interpretation, the translation will still *read* a certain way and is very unlikely to suggest the same range of interpretations as the original
(if indeed, the reader can work out what's being said at all)
Anyway, the notion that a translator just takes some meaning, puts it through their mental translation machine, and produces the same meaning in a new language is mistaken.
Anyway, the notion that a translator just takes some meaning, puts it through their mental translation machine, and produces the same meaning in a new language is mistaken.
This is why you need to know the original language if you truly want to speak authoritatively about a text. if you don't, you're just parroting someone else's interpretation
