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My instinct is to preserve as much of the original rhythm and flow as possible, but to make it sound readable to a native ear. In both your examples, the original uses short, punchy sentences, whic...
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#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-13T12:00:29Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16804 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T04:10:34Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16804 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
My instinct is to preserve as much of the original rhythm and flow as possible, but to make it sound readable to a native ear. In both your examples, the original uses short, punchy sentences, which is a particular quirk of the writer's style. Smoothing them out by combining them, to my ear, quite literally loses something in translation. Sometimes it's not possible to preserve every facet of the original. For example, in John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's _Divina Commedia_, there's no way to replicate the _terza rima_ in English. Italian has enough rhymes to allow you to write `aba, bcb, cdc, ded` and so on, but English doesn't. Ciardi chose to rhyme each first and third line and not worry about matching up second lines with anything else. This gives the flavor of the original without forcing the English into unreadable contortions.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2015-04-13T13:59:27Z (over 9 years ago)
Original score: 5