What is really lost in translation?: some observations on the importance and the ethics of translation

Almost every time that someone compares the translation of a text with
its original, the quality of the translation is rarely awarded with overall
positive comments: there is always ‘something missing’, there are always
some aspects of the original that are inevitably ‘left behind’, even when it is
recognized that the translator ‘has done a remarkable job’. Whenever
someone compares a text to its translation, there is always a feeling that the
‘original text has lost many of its qualities in translation’. There are far too
many examples which could evidently support this type of assertions, both
in literary texts and in texts of other linguistic genres, due not only to the
specific cultural and grammatical differences between the source and target
languages concerned, but also, sometimes, to the inattention or inaccuracies
of the translator(s) or of the automatic translation systems used to translate
a text.The following paper aims to identify the reasons behind this ‘sense of
loss’, and to suggest an alternative interpretation of it, by describing some
practical examples of translation and by illustrating the ethical and
theoretical implications involved in the translation of any text, in order to be
fully aware and to re-evaluate the complexity and the importance of this
process.