It's the early 40's in Japan. The war is on. Supplies are short. Our translator works on into the night, translating an American novel so his countrymen can better know their enemy, or so he will say.
I think about him sometimes. Maybe his eyes are growing dim. Maybe the old print of his English edition is just poor. Maybe sake is more readily available than electricity. Translation is grueling work.
The end of Chapter 15 is as good a translation as we've seen. Flows smoothly. Few mistakes. And then my rewrite of the beginning of Chapter 16 is littered with footnotes. Among other things, he has confused 'well' with 'yell' and 'stolid' with 'stupid'. Sometimes he misses the point of an entire phrase, but all too often he suffers from what seems to be just plain sloppy reading.
Granted, not every sentence Lewis wrote will make straightforward sense. And sometimes the idioms coupled with jokes can be too much even for a native reader, let alone a foreign one.
As a reader small differences in interpretation are often corrected by later context. As a translator though, these small discrepancies become cemented in the mortar of the finished work. When the passage seems strange, or even if it doesn't, double check the source. Then check it again.
Obviously I cannot know what our translator faced. But he comes across as talented, though a little brute force sometimes. And rather sloppy now and then. I hope modern readers will find our joint effort an improvement. He probably did his best. I'm just trying to do the same.
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