On Carpenter Readings

 It was overall a pretty good read, and a bunch of points to take notes from. Like most of the other readings from before, I got the impression that Carpenter too takes the challenge of translating as a fun challenge and directly says "That's the fun, and that's the challenge of it" showing most of the translators seem to have similar feelings when translating something hard. When she was talking about translating the book about Mozart, I wondered if there was any other way to translate the phrases such as "waku waku" or "doki doki" as I agree with translating one of them as "excited" but having the other as "pitter patter" sounded a little odd to me, since the words in japanese are quite simple and evoke their meanings quite directly, e.g doki doki literally being the noise of the heart beating. So using "pitter patter" I think is quite strange as the meaning isn't as clear and perhaps, the phrase isn't used as much. 

Carpenter touches upon translating as you read through the book or translating after reading the book and I feel as though I agree with her opinion that you should definitely read the book before translating. It helps the translator understand the book fully which I think is more important than specifically trying to translate their first experience reading the book. Plus, it's not like you 100% forget what you felt, more than likely when rereading, you'd feel or recollect that same feeling so I think the idea of the "best first experience" is better left for the readers.

Another part that I thought about was using footnote in her translations and in the interview, the insertion of a whole paragraph to describe the town. I think I would always try to minimize my additions and I agree that adding footnotes somewhat makes it seem like a more academic book. I think on top of that however, it somewhat takes me out of the book as if I'm flipping through pages and I read a footnote, it kind of breaks the flow, but maybe that's just me. Including a whole paragraph however, if the writer does it then that's completely fine and like she said, I don't think as a translator anyone would do something as huge as adding a whole paragraph to facilitate a description.

Jon