Copeland + roundtable

 Both readings seemed to have touched upon the same kind of topic which is the imperfection of translation, Copeland expands on this saying that translation is a result of one's past experiences, mentors and the like and I think that point was quite interesting, Seidensticker too somewhat mentioning this as he said that his translation was greatly influenced by his mentor, so basically every translator is kind of like a filter, and in that regard you'll get a different translation depending on who you ask. This also plays into one of the points of the round table I found intriguing, the point about "translating what you like". One of the members mentioned that people should only translate what they like and in doing so, you better know how to represent the author's feeling and convey them properly. On the other hand, another member disagreed saying that having a lack of sympathy for the author allowed him to better translate him/her, and that was quite interesting to me, and maybe that both sides are correct, some works might be better without sympathy to the author, and maybe sometimes as a translator you "think" you know what the author's envisioning but maybe that's just an accumulation of past experiences and the like.

Both readings had some examples of good and bad translation, the ones standing out to me mainly being the salt in the first reading and the hand/finger in the second. Where Copeland learns that the expression is more important than the actual metaphor, hence the loss of salt I think, in the original, Seidensticker went for hand instead of finger, which is interesting as he got criticized for it although he probably thought that at the time of translation, a hand would've been more appropriate. So it seems there are cases in which changing a metaphor can be good, and there is a balance between the original metaphor and the meaning behind it that must be met.

Jon