The interesting thing about clarifying and localising is that you’re always consciously making a trade-off between multiple competing factors - the original direct meaning, the emotion, tone and intent, and the ease of consumption in the target context.
And so how you choose to translate depends not only on the text, but the circumstance, the speaker, and who you are translating for.
If in a manga for example a character says (in Japanese) “the child of a frog is a frog,” you could make the choice to localise that with an equivalent English idiom, as “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” or you could perhaps instead take the speaking character’s personality into stronger account and preserve their meaning, such as “He’s a piece of shit, just like his old man.”
But it all depends on context. If that idiom showed up in a piece of poetry you might decide to leave it exactly as “the child of a frog is a frog.” - Perhaps there is related symbolism to preserve, and the ‘frog’ metaphor is important. But in that situation you can do it, because the reader will have more time and desire to study it, and preserving the original words may be more important than making it easy on the reader.
The interesting thing about clarifying and localising is that you’re always consciously making a trade-off between multiple competing factors - the original direct meaning, the emotion, tone and intent, and the ease of consumption in the target context.
And so how you choose to translate depends not only on the text, but the circumstance, the speaker, and who you are translating for.
If in a manga for example a character says (in Japanese) “the child of a frog is a frog,” you could make the choice to localise that with an equivalent English idiom, as “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” or you could perhaps instead take the speaking character’s personality into stronger account and preserve their meaning, such as “He’s a piece of shit, just like his old man.”
But it all depends on context. If that idiom showed up in a piece of poetry you might decide to leave it exactly as “the child of a frog is a frog.” - Perhaps there is related symbolism to preserve, and the ‘frog’ metaphor is important. But in that situation you can do it, because the reader will have more time and desire to study it, and preserving the original words may be more important than making it easy on the reader.
Translation is as much of an art as writing is.