Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'll give you a practical example. I can read both Latin and ancient Greek. There is no translation of either Homer's "Iliad" or Virgil's "Aeneid" which can even begin to give you the "feeling" of the original Greek or Latin hexameter verse. It just cannot be translated. No English translation of the Iliad can put you in a position to judge what the Greek original is actually like. You can translate the "story", but the result is not the same at all.
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I've read all three both in the original languages and in translation (English, Croatian). None of the translations that I've read have even come close to the original. I find this not only with Latin / Greek literature, but with translations of books in living languages that I've read and compared to the original text. Shades of meaning and poetic devices are often lost in the translation. I've worked as a translator professionally (all bureaucratic work, I'm afraid) and in translating you find yourself having to make many compromises to the integrity of the text just to get a basic meaning of it across to the readers.
This is especially true of literary texts. Aristophanes is TERRIBLE (I find) in translation; in Greek he really is hilarious. Jokes are notoriously hard to translate. Plautus is also really funny in Latin, where I have found that translations of him sound rather stuffy.