[ekianjo]

> And a lot of it comes down to native English speakers who fear losing the intended nuances of the original and so do a rigidly literal translation, because they think that's the "most accurate."

Agree with you.

One of the key issues is that, to be a good translator you need to have a good command of BOTH languages. I can tell you I see piss poor French translations (from English or other languages) every day as well, and it's not nitpicking, it's just people doing an awful job at what they are being paid for. Most people who do translations are barely even literate in their own language in the first place (you can see that in their obvious lack of vocabulary).

On the other hand, I'd say the best translations I have seen go way beyond the original work, making the translated work even better, more rich, more nuanced than what it was before. It's not just "translation", it's rather close to versioning.

[PhasmaFelis]

Oh, yes, absolutely.

Maddeningly, whenever that happens with e.g. anime you immediately get swarms of furious fans decrying the translation for "inaccuracy."

[ekianjo]

I can't say I have seen that in anime myself, but there's a couple of movies where the translation/version was actually better than the original movie in terms of language, figures of speech and so on. It was not just translation, it was beautiful writing.