Two quotes from
The joyful side of translation, novelist Adam Thirlwell's review of David Bellos's "Is that a fish in your ear?" (subtitled, Translation and the meaning of everything):
But a translation ... isn’t trying to be the same as the original, but to be like it. Which is why the usual conceptual duo of translation — fidelity, and the literal — is too clumsy.
Translation, ... rather than providing a substitute, instead “provides for some community an acceptable match for an utterance made in a foreign tongue.” What makes a match acceptable will vary according to that community’s idea of what aspects of an utterance need to be matched by its translation.
