Comments on Reading, Jaxon

 I get the same feeling as Lesser when I read "The Mysteries of Translation". Even nowadays, most people in the world are still monolingual and need translations, good translations that are for monolingual people. 

I tried to read French and English literature in primary school but the weird and long names in French and tedious depictions of building styles or house decorations that I couldn't imagine in my head as a Chinese made me wonder why someone would ever be interested in those as a child. Now I can read in three languages and when I translate something, I find myself becoming biased. As we discussed in class about the tree in front of the dorm, I want to keep the translation as original as possible but I didn't think about what readers will think of the word if they don't have any knowledge about trees and Japan? Will they give up reading just like what I felt when I read something that's completely out of my world?

From my reading experiences, I think I have never read one book translated by two different translators so I don't know how different they are like what Lesser described as the difference between Birnbaum and Jay Rubin.

In "Found in Translation", I like the point from Jay Rubin that we should read the literature work in their original language since it's inevitable to lose some information after translating especially for two totally different language systems like English and Japanese. I understand now all people can have time to learn a new language, especially languages that require a decent level to be able to read literature like Chinese. 

For "How Haruki Murakami's '1Q84' Was Translated Into English", the idea of "can a translation improve on the original" is interesting. In my opinion, proper localization might enable a book to sell better and get more resonance in another country. It's hard to say to improve unless the translator does a lot of modifications to the original work like what Lin Shaohua did for Murakami's work.

I read Lin Shaohua's translation of "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" and recently I read a small part of the original story in Japanese. They are actually very different because in Japanese it's written in casual form but in the translation, it's translated to written language in Chinese. However, the translator uses short sentences and casual diction to make the story close to causal language and at the same time, it makes fancier and dreamy depictions read better since it's a written language.