Translation in Literature

In recent years, many of my teachers have been making an effort to include literature coming from a variety of cultures, backgrounds, and ethnicities. It has been an amazing experience to read literature that I can personally relate to instead of constantly reading stories from a perspective I can relate to in some but not all aspects. While the experience of reading literature from different backgrounds is eye-opening, something that I have noticed is that in the translation of literature there is much more ambiguity to the meaning and reader’s understanding of the material. The translation of any text to another language is a complicated art that almost always leads to a distortion or complete change of the intended meaning. This distortion stems from multiple factors that exist between languages. One of the most prominent simply being the vocabulary and common day language. An example would be the Chinese phrase 吹牛 (chui1 niu2), which is literally translated into English as blow cattle. This phrase is something similar to a person who is “full of hot air” or “all talk.” Another way in which problems form from translation is simply the grammar and structure of each language. Literally translating nearly anything from Chinese to English will allow a person to have a general understanding of the meaning of the sentence, but it will not be clear. Translating any type of literature into another language is an extremely difficult skill and can only be completely accurate with the guidance or approval of the authors.