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Notes -
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Lol yeah
I would like to draw your attention to this excellent article on "The Peculiar Perils of Literary Translation" where you can find such quotes like: "Translation is writing. It's rewriting a literary work. You write the same book but in a different language, which means it's not the same book anymore. It's a sibling. It's not a twin.".
I would like to further emphasize how a translation is essentially a recreation of the work, so much that "[the original author] himself read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the [English] Harper & Row edition and pronounced it better than his Spanish original". That's very recent history, where the translator and the author are both alive and can correspond with each other.
Since I am not a Spanish speaker, I would like to present you the reverse: what happens to different translations of Spanish novel, Don Quixote, into English. Like just compare these 4 recent translations:
Sure, the grand meaning might be nearly the same, but I do think if we are to examine these interpretations of the same text, they're quite different! "son of my brain" vs "child of my understanding" vs "child of my intellect" vs "child of my imagination". These are quite broad, and the readers of these different translations would come out with quite different feelings.
So back to your analogy of translating GOT to Spanish and comparison to constitutional law. It would be more appropriate to compare to a situation where George R.R. Martin hands ten writers a one-page outline saying "a great battle happens, the heroes face hard choices, there are consequences," and asking them each to write the chapter. You'd get ten different chapters, all faithful to the outline, none of them "wrong". And that's exactly what the genuinely contested constitutional clauses are. "The court is just a Senate" only lands if there's a "real" reading judges are failing to apply. For cases on contested clauses, the text often runs out (and as I mentioned, sometimes deliberately made to run out) and someone has to decide. They don't have a choice but to interpret.
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