In " The Mysteries of Translation," I particularly enjoyed the metaphor Wendy Lesser had about being monolingual and being able to read a novel in Spanish if she was desperate enough but would get more out of it with a translation. This definitely spoke out to me with my level of Japanese and how I usually always seek out a subtitled version of whatever I'm watching to make sure I fully understand it. Her comparisons of the two versions of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle as well as the discussion on Dostoevsky really emphasizes on the importance of translation in the way that still emulates the original author's voice as well as capturing the mood and message of the original. I've read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and it is long and truthfully, boring at times but it all builds up to the climax of main character's moral dilemmas and it is all done so well language wise that I forget the original is written in Russian.
In the articles about Murakami Haruki's works, J. Phillip Gabriel mentioned "Stoicism in Japanese culture causes certain climaxes to be very low-key." Western culture is quite dramatic and our stories tend to be too, so having to balance both drama while maintaining stoicism to keep the mood of the original work can be difficult and is an interesting point.
Something else that was brought up was Japanese syntax structure. Phillip Gabriel mentioned "with Japanese verbs coming at the end, I sometimes feel that translating Japanese into English is like giving away the punch line." When I read Japanese, the fact that the verbs come at the end, especially a sentence with tons of noun modifiers, I never know what the action of the subject is until the very end. Personally, this is one of the hardest parts of translating Japanese to English because I always have to read or listen to the entirety of the sentence before I begin translating the sentence in my head.
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