In books that rely heavily on language-specific wordplay such as 'The Da Vinci Code' I can kind of see how it could be translated into French, German, or Spanish, but how do they even begin to try to translate it into Chinese, Korean, or Japanese with a totally different writing system?

lanfranco

"Traduttore/Traditore." That's a bit of Italian wordplay, indicating that translators are always, inevitably, traitors to the text. Literary translation is a great art, requiring years of practice and experience, and it is almost impossible for a translator to render the original sense of a text accurately in another language. Good translators admit this. The best an experienced translator who is utterly fluent in both tongues can do is come up with idiomatic equivalents -- but they will never be quite right. Trying to translate English into Chinese -- and getting the exact flavor and tone correct -- will be an impossible task. The translator can hope only to come close. I own an Italian translation of the first Harry Potter book. Even there, between two western languages, the translation doesn't quite work. Italian children like it, but their view of Harry Potter & Company is rather different from the one that children in the U.K. and the U.S. have. May 10 06, 6:26 PM

Kodansha_kid

As an amateur translator of Japanese text, I often encounter this problem. Translators usually deal with wordplay in two ways: they either translate it directly, with a footnote explaining what the wordplay of the original language was, or they change it to something in a similar vein that counts as wordplay in the Japanese language. Most professional translators use the latter method. I choose the former, but the downside of this is that my translations tend to bog down with footnotes and cultural notes. Aug 03 07, 4:08 PM