C. Terry and L. Riggs Reading Comments (Jane)

Terry brought up a lot of good points that I read in my Wakabayashi Chapter (CH7). He used an analogy about the relationship between the faith and beauty of women to describe the paradox in the translating process that I thought was perfect. It really does feel as if a perfect translation sounds incorrect because of the format of the writing. However, if the formatting sounds right, the writing is now different from the original. This constant battle that translators have to go through has to be standardized in my opinion because it will help translators decide when they have taken too much liberty, especially because a lot of changes can be justified in some way that disregards the author's intentions. The majority of omissions Terry recommended made sense. Especially when it came to the "silence" which can be translated into words or not depending on the intentions behind that silence. It highlights how a difference in language is not the only barrier between two groups of people. The cultural standards of speaking and writing also differ and have to be recognized while translating to help with making hard decisions regarding altering texts as a translator.

Riggs's two methods of reading through a text before translating made sense. In my experience, I do a little hybrid of both. I read the article paragraphs at a time so that I can read the whole paragraph and understand any vocabulary I don't know. From there, I go into translating what I thought I understood from my initial read before going back into the text, going sentence by sentence, to get technical wording straightened out. I think the amount of restructuring involved in translating academic text is very interesting. In a sense, it does not mean the translator is making the article their own because the content is not being changed. It is almost like its own type of translation in which the format is translated to be easily understood by the reader whose culture may form writing differently.