Translators may deliberately sacrifice the opacity of a difficult original for readability

Evidence

In the first place, the extreme difficulty of the Young Man’s style must be stressed. I am not alone in finding it at times opaque. Any attempt at a nearliteral translation would have merely produced extremely rebarbative jargon. I have certainly aimed at faithfulness, and I hope accuracy, in my translation of him, but where I could understand him myself (and that was not everywhere), I have tried at all times to remain comprehensible and readable. That may not always have been the Young Man’s own intention, perhaps, so in that respect translator and original may not always be in harmony. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 831

Categorization

• XREF: The tension between fidelity to an author’s obscurity and producing readable prose echoes translator dilemmas raised in Deep Listening and other craft writing. — connects to: Translation loss is inevitable and driven by the translator’s preconceptions — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2194; Classical translations routinely distort meaning through culturally specific terms — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1600