@0xabad1dea Ken Liu's translator's postscript for "The Three Body Problem" really drove this idea home for me:

«The act of translation involves breaking down one piece of work in one language and ferrying the pieces across a gulf to reconstitute them into a new work in another language.

...

In a sense, translating may be harder than writing original fiction because a translator must strive to satisfy the same aesthetic demands while being subjected to much more restrictive creative constraints.»

(with particular emphasis on "new work" which was not a perspective I'd encountered before, but of *course* it's a brand new work that when done well happens to be closely related to the original)

@0xabad1dea I love the fact that French novelist Jules Verne learned the traditional Russian units of distance so that he could make use of them in his novel Michael Strogoff.

Related: A verst is made up of 500 sazhen, each of which is made up of 3 arshin. A verst is also just a hair longer than a kilometer.

Aside: The biblical tale of the 'talents' given to the wise and foolish servants gains meaning when you consider that (according to some) a talent was equivalent to the volume of a large water-urn filled to the brim with denarius coins, each of which represented an entire day's wages. At current US minimum wage, that would mean each coin would be worth $58.

@0xabad1dea

A lot of Gaelic writing will describe a quantity as "three times fifty", which is really just idiomatic for "mega". Poetry not unlike Atari Jaguar adverts.

@0xabad1dea I lately heard (in audiobook) a book that I had read as a child, Twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and at many places things are unnecessarily difficult because there is no footnote translating measurements into modern metric.

What the heck is a myriamètre? (10 km)
What the heck is a league? (apparently it's a "metric league" of 4 km)
What the heck is a "toise"?
When they talk about "brasses", is it "fathoms" in the British/American sense, that is, two feet?

@0xabad1dea IMO the most important part of a good translation is knowing when and when not to translate. A good example of the two extremes being "keikaku means plan" and "jelly donuts."

"onigiri" is actually a rather good example, being a fairly specific yet 'simple' type of food: you could go with either the purely-descriptive translation of just "rice balls" if the viewer doesn't have or need any further detail (cough jelly donuts...), "onigiri rice balls" if you want to be specific and descriptive, or just "onigiri" if you can safely assume the reader already knows what that is.

@0xabad1dea

“Reading a text in translation is like kissing a bride through the veil.” — Chaim Nachman Bialik

Plus also the entire concept of the Targum. Hence the Rutgers campus newspaper.