On Cross-Cultural Translation

A. What translators do:
1. Translators assume something in one language/culture can be communicated, "borne across" and recovered in another language/culture.
2. Translators owe "fidelity" to the "prior" text/author--to the original author’s purposes, what the author wants from readers, how the author envisions readers, the processes and modes of creative production with the author’s culture, the arrangement and materials of the prior text, etc.
3. Translators are granted no authority to disregard the original text/author (being translated) or to substitute the original text with an entirely new text of the translator’s own. The translator cannot interpret the original text in terms only of the translator-reader’s own experience and culture.
4. Translators, however, do not and cannot just repeat or copy the words, literally and accurately, of the prior/original text --if the translators' goals are also to transmit cultural meanings and aesthetic beauties of the original text into another language for readers of a different culture and aesthetic values. 
5.  Translators must (to some extent) interpret, mediate, intervene in (i.e. change) the "prior"/original text to be translated, to achieve the above (item #4) goals. Informed translators acknowledge that their mediation is inevitable; that the translators' own experiences, cultures, worldviews, aesthetic values, etc., will influence even the most "faithful" translations.
6. Translators aim to create a "complex tension," or dialectical interplay, between two goals:

Goal 1: to make the "alien" original text familiar, accessible, immediate, readable to the intended cross-cultural readers; to allow the prior text to speak as directly as possible, with power, immediacy, urgency, to the cross-cultural reader, enabling "identification" (even if this is problematical)--enabling the reader to imagine her/himself in the author’s place--without erasing cultural differences and "appropriating" the original author’s distinct cultural/personal identity;
Goal 2: to respect and render the difference of the original text/author, the cultural distance that does exist between the readers’/translators’ world and the prior text/author’s context--yet without making that difference and distance so inaccessible as to prompt cross-cultural readers to dismiss or abandon the rewards, as well as responsibilities, of crossing cultures.

7. At issue in judging the worth of a translation is not just its literal  "accuracy," therefore, but also the "appropriateness" of the translator’s choices and changes in preserving  "complex tension" outlined above (item #6).

B. How readers read (learn, teach) cross-cultural texts in "translation":
1. Readers acknowledge the above conditions, mediations, goals, limitations and possibilities of translation as definitive of reading (learning, teaching) across cultures.
2. Such readers expect cross-cultural reading to be a sometimes disquieting (e.g. the anxieties of "cross cultural translation), but an ultimately rewarding activity.
3. Such reading is approached as highly interactive, a dynamic of participating-distancing that makes readers more aware (a) of the organizing principles at work in their own reading and interpretation, and (b) of the claims the cross-cultural text makes upon readers even as it gives them access to another world.
4. Readers are challenged to re-position themselves between and within both worlds--their own culture and that of the text--and readers consciously choose to work within/between the difference.
5. This effort at "transculturation" (Dingwaney and Maier cite Perez Firmat) is a transition, passage, process of fermentation and turmoil, that leads to a cross-cultural synthesis of the two worlds - and ultimately a better understanding of both cultures!

On "Literal" vs. "Artistic" Translation