H. Hibbett Reading Response (Jane)

 I think Hibbett's introduction to the world of translation was interesting because it almost seemed to have happened by chance when he met Tanazaki. He goes into depth about how he started in the world of translating which I thought was interesting because he seemed to have picked up Japanese extremely quickly just by reading it often. He goes over a couple of hardships he faced as a translator: Gender-specific styles of writing and culturally specific topics. These are two struggles translators face that we have gone over many times before and similarly, translators are unafraid to own up to their mistakes when it comes to it. 

In regards to gender-specific writing styles, I found it interesting when he discussed researching using other works. I personally think I would have gone to a woman and had her work with me to figure out how she would write the words I was translating. In addition, it would have made more sense to also pool in the results from multiple women and decide from there how to write. In this way, the writing style of women is collected from women and not another translation. 

The culturally specific aspects of Japanese stories seem to be the common enemy of many translators. Like Hibbett said, the balance in avoiding footnotes for flow purposes but also making sure that the reader is educated and understands what is being described seems to be a balance that varies among translators. I thought it was interesting that even the section of translation he considers the easiest became a huge problem because of the sōzu.