What Mistakes Should I Correct?

When I began my Arrowsmith project, I viewed this old translation as something almost sacred that needed to be preserved. Self-anointed though I was and am, I saw my mission as one of making minimal changes to bring the writing into the modern age. This, I thought, was really all I was qualified to do anyway, and then only barely so.

One of the first major mistakes I encountered was where Doc Vickerson is telling Martin his war stories, and mentions being the first doctor to do an appendectomy in "this neck of the woods." The translator had missed the idiom and rendered this as "mouth of the forest." 

I've written about this below, but I wondered, should I correct this? Though it's technically wrong, it's not particularly important to the story... In the end, I did correct.

Along the way, I found many more imperfections in the translation, some of them much larger, much more important, some of them humorous. 

I have continued to correct them all. My reasoning is that this is Mr. Lewis' book, and any translation  of it ought to say what he meant it to say. I know Mr. Ugai did his best in that direction, and now I have an opportunity to help him out. I'm over half finished with Chapter 8 at present, and have currently 104 footnotes denoting changes I've made to the translation (beyond just modernizing characters and words, which is happening everywhere). Of course, my confidence is also growing as I go. But then, I hope not more than it should.

Just this morning I was working in Section III of Chapter 8. A few paragraphs in we find this: "For once, Martin was impenitent." There were, in my view, two problems with this passage: 1) For once became just once, and impenitent became impatient. 

The latter is probably just sloppy reading by the translator, and isn't all that far wrong due to some meaning overlap between the words. But of course I changed it. 

The former, though, is even more subtle. To me, for once means the same as at last. It implies that the action is overdue, or at least that one might have expected it sooner. Just once, on the other hand, is a little random. In either case, we don't know for sure what will happen in the future, but for once implies, at least to me, that I shouldn't be surprised to see something similar the next time, where just once gives one the sense that it's not all that likely to happen again.

Perhaps this difference is too subtle to worry about. Indeed. there are many such that I haven't changed, feeling they were well within the translator's discretion. Perhaps I'd have left this one alone too, had it been the only issue in the sentence. But, since I was in there anyway, I fixed it as well.

By the way, sometimes I've found myself missing Japanese idioms, and have been on the verge of fixing something that turned out to be OK given the idiomatic meaning. Since I've caught myself doing this, I'm guessing I've corrected out a reasonable translation in a few cases. Like Mr. Ugai, I am also not perfect. But, at least if I did change an idiom that might have sufficed, to the best of my ability I've replaced it with straightforward language that is still a correct translation.