Hearing Voices Reading (Jordan)

 In "Hearing Voices", Rebecca Copeland revisits her journey as a translator. The first step she made in her growth as a translator was coming to an understanding of what her Professor, Seidensticker, said about translation: that it is a series of dilemmas. More generically, I just thought of a dilemma as a challenge, but apparently, the dictionary definition is "a situation requiring a choice between equally undesirable alternatives." Copeland didn't want to believe that certain parts of a text can be untranslatable, but she quickly learned that this could be the case. It seems like the art of translation is sometimes not about finding the "right" answer but finding the least wrong answer. Copeland also writes about her determination to maintain the presence of characters' "voices" between translations. I found it hard to define in my mind exactly what contributes to a character's voice, but there is certainly something. I do imagine every time a character's dialogue is translated, some part of their character disappears, and its the translator's job to make sure this doesn't happen.