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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/43986
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Let's look at the example from the _Three Musketeers_ that you give.

Readers today probably wouldn't know what an aglet is. And if they knew, they would probably think of shoe laces and not know how aglets were worn on historic dresses. The answer by Peter Shor to the linked question is a good example for this: after doing some research, he wrongly assumes that the aglets in the _Three Musketeers_ were worn as a decorative knot on the shoulder. My second answer to that questions contains an illustration that shows how these aglets were really worn. Not something that a modern reader would ever think of without doing quite a bit of informed research.

So what would you achive if you "corrected" that mistranslation?

Readers today understand perfectly well what "diamond studs" are and how they might have been worn. Using "diamond studs" in a translation gives readers an object they understand and can dismiss, while "aglets" would constantly irritate them.

You certainly could provide a footnote, ideally with an illustration, but nothing would have been gained by that for the average reader who wants to read Dumas' novel as an adventure tale. Because whether or not the objects were actually studs or aglets is completely irrelevant to the story. So "diamond studs" does for readers today what _ferrets_ (possibly) did for French readers in 1844: they provide a working [MacGuffin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin).

To me, "correcting" the studs to aglets would make the _Three Musketeers_ unnecessarily difficult to read for readers today.

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Answers for other passages from other texts will be different.

For example many popular Bible translations, such as the King James versoin, have become familiar to readers but are often completely wrong and distort the meaning of the original text. For that reason scholars have rightfully sought to establish new translations to reflect advances in scholarship. Not correcting a mistaken Bible translation would be criminally negligent, as wars have been legitimized by the contents of that book.

Original score: 2