I’m mainly speaking from the viewpoint of translating (non basic dialog) from Japanese > English or Mandarin > English which often or not gets the results wrong or the translation is terrible (that is something you barely hear when you translate let’s say from German > English), you know the mistakes upon learning any language when you translate from the target one to your native tongue alongside the nuances, grammar and sentence structure.
First, English is a Germanic language, so that’s not a great comparison - modern German and English both stem from an earlier Germanic language, so they share a lot of words and basic structure (and just as important, the cultures where these languages matured shared a common history).
Second, what you’re really comparing are languages with different origins, keeping in mind the written form of any language is at best a descriptive approximation of the spoken form.
So these are languages with very different sound structures, on top of cultures with different paradigms, histories, etc.
It’s really a “Darmok and Jilad at Tanagra” problem - we really do a lot of communication via memes, as much as we may not notice it on the daily.
Back to translating logographic form of a language to another language that’s written using an alphabetic form - the first is based on something like syllables or entire concepts, the second constructs those ideas/concepts via multiple phonemes->words>sentences. And now we circle back to the paradigms and memes of two different cultures.
Written langauge isn’t just a different way to scribe the same things, it’s actually scribing very different things depending on the underlying culture.
(I’m not a linguist - corrections from someone more knowledgeable requested).
I agree completely with you.
Chinese languages or Japanese have nothing in common with English. Each of them belong to a different fundamental language family, distinct from Indo-European which a large majority of European languages come from. When translating, you need to adapt everything. The language structure is different, the culture is different, the fundamental concept of how the “language” tool is built is different. You can either translate faithfully and make no sense in the target language, or adapt to the target culture but completely lose the original text.
For example, Japanese or Korean are deeply structured around honorifics. Not just stuff like “your honor” or “your majesty”, the entire grammar and vocabulary change depending on how you stand socially vs your interlocutor. This is profoundly embedded and natural in the dialog and has very important meaning in the original language, but is completely impossible to translate or adapt to English, which has no honorifics system.
Oh, wow, that’s fascinating and I had no idea.
You make a great point about choosing how/what to translate - deep meaning or literal. Even then I’m sure it’s really difficult.