For example, many people in this thread are insistent they want a "phrase by phrase" translation. But what if the author wrote the book in a colloquial spoken style, that is specifically supposed to come across as neutral contemporary language? If you translate the work into English in a stilted style that carefully preserves the structure of the original even when it produces unnaturalistic English, you have lost a key aspect of the original vision of the work. It won't hit the reader the same way.
Sometimes translators can highlight a less considered aspect of the work, like when you hear a great cover song that makes you appreciate the original that much more.
I understand the ideal of the perfectly translated thing, by definitionally it can't exist. I suggest going to a library and read the first page of 5+ translations (let's say, Don Quixote) and you will have a pretty clear sense of what the original text must have conveyed as well as several conflicting voices, some of which you will hate and others you may even appreciate. But you can never hear the original through a translation so it might as well be one that is interesting in its own right.
Lol Just learn many other languages and cultural idioms that are sometimes regional and dense with meaning?
Also, as I mentioned, some idioms have regional meaning which raises the complexity greatly
Second, Learning a language is not a binary variable. It takes decades to master a language.
Finally, Your ability to appreciate a book is both a function of the text and your ability to comprehend the text. A translated book will give you better experience than the book in a language you are unfamiliar with.
I think it’s a trade off then. I’d prefer authenticity, richness and nuance over accessibility. It is just preference. Did you prefer the modern accessible versions of Shakespeare or the originals in their Elizabethan glory?
These have as much to do with ancient greek culture and maybe mindset as language per se. But even still, the choice is to elide them or let them be strange. There's no real way to carry the meaning through to english without it being striking, calling attention to the original.
Granted, the languages I speak have so little overlap in text it's actually quite difficult to imagine translating between them without a great loss of meaning and tone. And if you look at something like Tang chinese poetry (let alone something truly ancient) translation becomes a game of "which aspect of the linguistic dynamics here are worth communicating to english speakers?"
So, I'm not sure the "language" punches through so much as you see innovation in the use of english to convey virtually-impossible-to-translate tone and rhythm and wordplay—but it's still relatively contemporary and idiomatic english, or it would simply not reach most readers. Though somehow superlative translators manage more than I thought was possible.... sometimes it feels like reading shakespeare at great effort and difficulty is the closest english-only-speakers will come to understanding how constraining a language modern english is for formal poetry.
Prose is much easier.
However, there will be cases where the original text will have lines that shaped the language and literature it came from and it would be remiss not to let the reader feel that texture, even if it is a challenge to read.
It's difficult to pick examples but an influential line like 'all that glisters is not gold' could be translated to the equivalent of 'don't be fooled by appearances' but that would just kill the imagery and poetic quality. I would want the equivalent of 'glister', I'd want it to express the shine and glow, I'd want the word to be archaic and I'd want the rhythm of the line to be there.
An adaptator getting rid of them to have more natural English will come up with way worse phrasing, while losing a lot of the nuance and meaning of the original text.
In a way, the reader undertands that it all happens in a non-English country, so getting unnatural English phrasing isn't much of an issue.