Steiner and Bellos

I personally found the reading a little difficult to read but was still interesting. Steiner talks a lot about how meanings in a text can change when it is translated from one language to another. He talks about the moves of the translator when trying to extract meaning from the original text, trust, aggression, and incorporation. Trust can never be final and "is betrayed, trivially, by nonsense, by the discovery that 'there is nothing there' to elicit and translate" due to the human bias towards seeing the world as symbolic. The translator may find that "anything" or "almost anything" can mean "everything." 

Bellos talks about how to represent foreignness and foreign concepts from the original to the translated work. The most obvious way to make a text sound foreign would be to leave parts of it in the original. For example, Bellos talks about how early French to English translations kept the full titles and everyday expression in French. This could be used in Japanese for expressions that don't have a one-for-one translations like 'itadakimasu' although you would still probably have to explain what it means to the readers. Bellos says, "The natural way to represent the foreignness of foreign utterances is to leave them in the original, in whole or in part." which I also believe as not all words have direct translations and making something to cover for it might just completely erase its original feeling. 

Brian