There has been a lot of discussion amongst the learned community about the elevated or decreased quality in translation of texts between languages. Can translations be better than the original?
The roughest translations to English might come from arcane local dialects in eastern-bloc countries, from very complicated languages of the far east, or archaic languages now defunct and not spoken or studied outside of academia. Truthfully though the best quality translations can be anything; you could read a glowing English text turned around by a Spanish translation service. The quality of the work really is up to the magic of the pen of the translator.
Still, the question can’t be ignored; how do translators turn in work better than the work they were translating? Translators read text in its native tongue; as readers you would hope that the translator would do their best to give back the most correct domestic translation. Some would argue that this type of nit-picking for perfection is an English speaking world problem and just indicates feelings of superiority.
I may have to counter that the increase in text quality to modern English from older works or less developed languages just gets back to the advancement of the species. We are not cave men anymore; no one wants to read text which supposes that we are.
If you were going over a child’s paper you wouldn’t let glaring errors go on unchecked, would you? You would at least urge them to look over the work again very carefully and see if they can find any problems. So it goes for books being translated; even if the phrasings are correct in the native tongue that doesn’t mean that the English speaking world would let errors slide. It would “read” wrong.
As translations get more evolved, translated works get better and better. A translator has to think about their own name attached to a project. Many people are native Spanish speakers so if someone took a text from a Spanish translation service you can bet that the translator would not want to offend anyone reading their translation. Especially if the reader speaks both languages and would notice the error.
The creative process is a dodgy one. But as works spring up out of more far-removed places and the publishing world, hungry, as are their readers, for something new and fresh and exciting keeps tapping these veins, you can expect more examples of these far higher quality “interpretation-translations” of text to come about.
Source:
http://bunchtranslate.blogspot.com/2012/01/when-translations-are-better-than.html