To use a crude analogy: a prostitute may genuinely like you, but would she have sex with you if you weren't paying?

Perhaps the more important question is: does the translator actually understand what the author is saying and is he/she familiar with the author's context?

Are these images on the front page of your novels in Spain?

Cartlos

about prostitutes: she wouldn't have sex with you, but she would kiss you on the mouth.

@Carlos

nope. leave the interpretation to a reader. the most important is to understand the essence of the cultural identity of the country and the language, then a translator is able to rewrite the nuances and make them understandable for a reader from an other country. Their is a huge diffrence between spanish and dutch cultural identity. and the language of course.
p.s. plus trivia: a translator must be good at writings.

Rutgher

If you go to the section “oeuvre” on this site, you can actually see the jackets of my books including my books that were published in Spain.

lz

Of course translators must be good at writing. But they must be able to withstand the temptation to rewrite the material being translated.

Some things will always be lost in translation. Take Dutch and Afrikaans, two very closely related languages. The vocabularies of both languages are largely the same. However, I have so far failed to explain the bleakness of a Dutch "Vinex" housing estate in winter to South Africans who have never been abroad. The Northern European lifestyle is very different from the South African and the frames of reference are significantly different. But the bleakness could be very important in a story, for example, about a despairing and depressive person who commits some drastic and shocking act, despite living in relative material comfort. In my view, the translator should not embellish the original, but should at least bear these considerations in mind.

@Carlos

I don't agree with your first remark. I think a translator should be allowed to rewrite a work. At least in such a way that the emotion of the text remains the same, but the words might be altered quite a lot.
Ofcourse the 'vinex' problem remains difficult, since there might not be an alternative comfortable but somewhat sad and boring house in South Africa. In that case describing what the word means is the only solution.

@Arnon: you chose a rather stimulating picture today.

Simon

I consider these images as very vulgar. This is the puritan in me, something I inherited from my father.

Carlos

Is a Dutch “Vinex” neighborhood fundamentally different from suburbia in let’s say Jersey?
Shouldn’t a translator translate as accurate as possible what the author wrote instead of worrying (too much) about South Africans who have never been abroad? One should not underestimate the reader.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand what you are trying to say but I believe that in your example the writer is at fault.

Mieke

really? this interests me.
I can see that someone might find them too exposing for his/her taste, but 'vulgar' seems to be a very negative word here. Apart from exposing and perhaps shallow I can't find too much wrong with the pictures.

Rutgher

I think the picures are illustrations of passionate amateurism.

Arnon

A passionate amateur can be better than a contract killer, one sentence does not overrule the other.

simon

Would you say that pictures of human beings with clothes are less shallow than pictures of human beings without clothes?

A man with a towel and a woman with a gun, so far for political correctness.
(In favour of foreign cultures, we could argue to start translating music, paintings, sculptures and not to forget, buildings.)

Arnon

I guess it depends on what those human beings are doing in the picture. People might be doing very philosophical things while being naked.

Nak

Could you give an example?

perhaps a bit easy, but how about Rodin's Thinker?

http://www.southdacola.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/rodin20thinker.jpg

Nak

Oh, the thinker is naked?