Translation is a very subtle thing unless you are emotionally in contact with the original author. You can not do a good job of it. In translating an author, you practically engage to speak for him in a new language, and you can not do so unless you are speaking for an old friend, so to speak. And your friend, knowing how strange his own expressions are often sound in a foreign language gives you some freedom in expression, provided that he can trust that you truly understand what he was trying to say, and that it would be the way he would say it in English, if he were thinking and writing in English.-Lin yu tang.
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