When I was reading the Article "Translation in a Global Market" I noted on the side the thought of losing the 'beauty of translation.' If we were to become this transnational monoculture there would be no need for translations. This thought made me kind of sad and I wondered at the idea of translations themselves being an art form (kind of what we talked about in some of the earlier articles where translations are creative works of their own). Maybe there is even something beautiful about a "bad" translation. I am the sort of person who likes "bad" movies because of how bad they are. Every halloween we watch a horrible scary movie like "Teeth" or "Cheerleader Massacre" because of how terrible the plots are and how awkward the acting is. There's something that is absolutely wonderful about watching these and I wonder if even bad translations have a sort of beauty to them. Maybe the beauty is the clumsy attempt at bridging two worlds. It is almost what makes us human. Human beings are social creatures and translations are an attempt to be social.
I really feel that in the imperfect translations between people there can be something gained or learned. It is what makes us human, the mistakes or misunderstandings that we have. If there were just machines that could translate everything absolutely perfectly there would be no mistakes or misunderstandings and the human part of it, the part of it that separates us from other creatures or things would be obsolete and then what would be the point in being human?
Not to mention almost all the plot lines for creative writers would be taken away. So many stories rely on misunderstandings between people. What if these translating machines not only translated perfectly from other languages, but just from one person to the next? Then there would be no misunderstandings ever.
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I think you have a point about clumsy or bad translations having some beauty to them. This isn't very relevant but it had me wistfully thinking of a translation I used to own of Baudelaire's poems. I can't find them on the internet but I loved them because they made no attempt at verbosity and really brought out the conversational tone of some of his poems. Everything else tries to be so lofty!
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