What makes a good translation?

A translation should convey to readers or listeners in their own tongue a certain content – but also emotions and subtext – from a language which they themselves do not (or not sufficiently) understand. It should be phrased in the target language in such a way that it does not give the impression of an artificial construct imitating the source language (thus sounding alien) but instead sounds “familiar” to the recipient. Ideally, it should be like a perfectly dubbed movie: You get the impression that the voice you hear actually belongs to the actor you see.

«C’est là véritablement traduire, qui est de reconstituer au plus près l’effet d’une certaine cause … a moyen d’une autre cause.» (Paul Valéry)

(“True translation means to reconstitute the effect of a specific cause as closely as possible by means of another cause.”)

Alas, many bad translations are repeated so many times that they become established and no longer sound as “strange” as they should. Linguistic deficiency is not only revealed by German speakers who flood their speech unnecessarily with English terms where simple German equivalents would be readily available. Think about the many Germans who use idiomatic Anglicisms in speech or writing, such as „das meint“ (derived from “that means,” instead of „das bedeutet“), or „das macht Sinn“ (from “that makes sense,” for „das ergibt einen Sinn“), or „am Ende des Tages“ (from “at the end of the day,” for „unterm Strich“). Even entire phrases are (wrongly) translated literally and slowly find acceptance. While there is and has always been an idiomatic equivalent for the English proverb, “The early bird catches the worm” („Wer zuerst kommt, mahlt zuerst“), we frequently come across the literal translation of the English phrase, which is unidiomatic in German and thus sounds artificial and “translated”! A translation, however, should not be obvious – and, most of all, it should not be recognizable by the fact that it sounds bad in the target language! Quite to the contrary: readers and listeners should have the impression that the text was originally written in their own language.

“… whatever can be said about the inadequacy of translating: It is and will always be one of the most important and most worthy businesses in the world at large.“ (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)