scafandr

“Noted translator William Weaver compared translation to a performing art. I like that metaphor. When doing a translation, I'm engaging in a cultural and linguistic performance, an attempt to re-create an artifact in a new medium. It is a humbling and thrilling experience.
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[Xia Jia's] translation of my novella, "The Man Who Ended History", is in many ways an improvement on the original.”
― Ken Liu, Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation

“In a sense, translating may be harder than writing original fiction because a translator must strive to satisfy the same aestetic demands while being subjected to much more restrictive creative constraints. [...] The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture's patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language's rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people's gestures and movements.”
― Ken Liu, The Three-Body Problem