This article brought up an interesting point about how the grammatical and linguistic differences between languages can cause issues in translating. This is something I often run into problems when I'm asked to translate a song or movie dialogue into English from Japanese. I often struggle with wording and clarity, and there are a lot of times when the interaction ends with the other person asking me, "Do you really speak Japanese?" When translating in and out of Spanish, or other romance language, it's often much easier to get the point across. The linguistic similarity between the languages enables that ease. With languages like Japanese, it's much more difficult with the added steps of having to wait for the end of the sentence to hear the verb, switch around the noun modifiers and subclauses, and add in any subjects or objects left up to context. This article did a great job pointing out this difficulty with the difference between directly translated passages and professionally translated passages. Even with the concept of many ways to say 'you', it is true that Japanese is a language with a lot of context packed into the specific word choice used. The formality of the sentence, the form of 'I' or 'you' used, honorifics, and other characteristics of the Japanese language cannot always translate smoothly to English.
I also thought it was interesting to mention that a translator needs both humility and arrogance to translate. While I understood the idea behind why humility is needed when working with another writer's text and words, arrogance was surprising. While doing this first translation homework even, I can feel the embarrassment of submitting my own words as the replacement for someone else's, knowing that there is probably a much better translation out there. It was comforting to know that this is a universal feeling among translators.
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