Jackie Roving’s Reviews > Illuminations: Essays and Reflections > Status Update

The difference between storytelling and communicating information is that storytelling is meant to be a more intimate telling of one's own experiences and creative thinking, whereas mere information is nothing but a raw conveying of meaning and/or description.

Storytelling is a lost art in terms of how people should communicate their experiences. Part of this is due to the fact that anyone can tell their story, and some people believe their experiences are unworthy of being told. No matter how boring or even traumatic one's own experiences might be, every person is a world onto itself in terms of experiences.

There is no such thing as a perfect or total translation of a work. The rift time and cultures creates makes it so that the original meaning of any writing becomes lost and is never found again in perfect form.

What the translator must do to compensate for this is to generate a whole new meaning out of the writings for their time that does justice to what remains of the original meaning and speaks to their present.

The goal of any good translator is to not merely translate what is being said, but to retain the substance and content of what is being communicated by the original work. In order to do this, it requires an intimate understanding of the original work.

It also requires the translator to take words that can't be put properly into the new language and describe them with the power of analogy and symbolism.