Leanne Ogasawara addresses the translation of Nobel laureate Han Kang’s writing, and the debate over the degree to which the English translation by Deborah Smith perhaps even improves on the original.

She naturally brings up Cicero, who preferred not to translate word for word, and the Japanese distinction between word-level and sense-level translation.

I'm reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's fantastic Gödel Escher Bach.

In his discussion on page 379 he talks about the difficulty of translating the apparently simple Russian С переулок, or, in English letters, S pereulok. The Russian word pereulok means "Lane," and Dostoevsky chose to use initials instead of full names for streets, so:

• It seems easy. The translation should be "S. Lane." But no. None of the three translations Hofstadter consulted took that route.

• One translation he consulted came pretty close: "S. Place."

• Another translator helped out the English reader, who might not know what to do with streets with letter names, and who perhaps might think that that's how streets are named in Russian. That second translator chose: "Stoliarny Place," having (probably correctly) deduced that the "S" stands for "Stoliarny."

• The third translator went a step further: "Carpenter's Lane"! After all, stolyar means "carpenter" in Russian, and -ni is an adjectival suffix. So why not "Carpenter's" for stolarny?

• But if that's the way to go, Hofstadter ponders, why stop there? Perhaps we should just read the equivalent novel by Dickens...

Buy the book and jump to page 379. Then enjoy the whole thing. It's that good: