Gratitude Day 7: The Art of Translation

A decade ago, I took a graduate course called "The Art and Craft of Translation" that really opened my eyes to just how beautifully messy and interpretive the act of translation actually is. Like a lot of people, I had very surface, black-and-white preconceptions of what translation is. I thought there were literal translations and more interpretive translations, but what I really didn't expect to learn was just how hard it was to translate a text, even a simple one, from one language to another (even somewhat close neighbors like English and French), and my experience in translating texts showed me that there really is no such thing as a "literal translation." Literalism is one of many variables in the decision matrix, and no matter how literal you might want to make a translation, it is limited by many outside factors, such as the nature of the text being translated (such as a casual text message conversation vs. some poetry that's densely packed with nuance and multiple layers of…